Let me tell you a story
14 years ago I met a man called Shaun Murphy aka Smurf. We became best friends, a few years later we became partners. In early 2007 we were sitting in the Red Lion in Otley waiting for a gig to start. Two of our friends came in and plonked 2 GPS devices on the table and Smurf said "I've got one of those. How come you have them?". They pulled out printed cache pages (yes, we had to do that back then) and explained the multi cache they had just done.
We went home after the gig, did a bit of research on Geocaching but didn't do anything with it. A few weeks later we were watching some American crime drama and the premise for this particular murder was based around Geocaching. We took this as a sign that we should look again at this weird hobby. So, we signed up, dug around the map looking for a suitable cache to start with, picked a day to go and we went.
On Sunday 3rd June 2007, Smurf and I set off to do the Chevin Chase multi cache. We walked round finding the clues by manually entering the coords into our yellow eTrex. We got a set of coordinates for the final and set off in search of treasure. We arrived at our presumed GZ and began our rookie search. We couldn't find it. However, I remembered that there was a spoiler photo on the cache page and I had recently got a smart(ish) phone. I tried and tried to get a 3G signal so I could load the cache page but it was in vain so we headed home without finding the cache and promptly logged our first DNFs.
At the same time as we were logging, we checked the spoiler pic and lo and behold we were in exactly the right spot but we didn't have a caching sense. We resolved to go back the following weekend and we found it. We did 2 other multis that day too.
Over the years we made loads of good friends in the Geocaching community and we both became Community Volunteers. We split up in 2011 but we remained best friends and stayed that way even when I moved down to Bournemouth. Last year, Smurf was diagnosed with cancer and he died 29th April this year. Just over a month before our 10th caching anniversary.
No words can express how much I miss him and I hope this is a fitting tribute to a man loved by many. This cache is placed at the spot where the final of the Chevin Chase multi was.