From its source to its mouth, the Mersey River flows through varied topography, rich agricultural land and many interesting centres of population. The Meandering the Mersey (MTM) series will follow, as much as practical, the course of the Mersey River with caches being placed at varying intervals. We trust you will enjoy the area.
In the first decade of this century Aiden and Karena McLeod created an uncommissioned bronze sculpture to represent the power and fascination of the sea. Their creative aspect was that of power and strength to reflect the elements of wind and sea with man rising from the sea. The sculpture came to the attention of a local service club which took on the project of having the sculpture located at the end of the western breakwater at the mouth of the Mersey River. There was a great deal of controversy and criticism from the local and wider community but after years of lobbying by combined service clubs, the sculpture was installed and named "Spirit Of the Sea". The sculpture remains a bone of contention today, with a local group very critical of the annual cost to maintain the sculpture and fountain.
Whilst the "Spirit Of The Sea" has not brought the bus loads of tourists initially envisaged by the proponents, it does attract a deal of attention and bemusement from visitors and locals. The "Spirit Of The Sea" can be found at the published coordinates.
It is not widely known that the sculpture has an undocumented feature, a communication device. On very rare occasions three different colours of light, in three different shapes, can be seen coming from the statue. It is believed to be a code but, as yet, the code has not been cracked. Being geocachers, we think that there is a distinct possibility that the code is a message detailing the location of a hidden object. We just happened to be at the right spot at the right time and managed to record the message emanating from the "Spirit Of The Sea" and the recording is shown below. Can you decipher the code and locate the hidden object?
The above link should take you to an animation but security has now disabled that link. Until a workaround can be implemented, either
- contact the COs via the Message system and a copy of the .gif will be sent to you.
- or log into Geocaching Australia before trying to access the link as the animation is hosted on GCA
It can get very confusing when attempting to detect the start and end of the message. So we have added a frame with "Start" and another with "Finish" to make the sequence clear. If the start and finish frames are ignored, the message consists of 192 frames each having a duration of one second.
Your challenge, should you wish to accept it, is to decode the message and to see whether or not the message contains information about a stash. If so, retrieval of the stash would be a bonus. Good Luck. There isn't a checker because, to our knowledge, the message has not been decoded. We hope that the message will contain precise information to the location of the stash.
CONGRATULATIONS membsec on solving this puzzle and finding the cache - a great achievement. You must have been on tenterhooks having solved the puzzle before going away but having to wait until you got back hoping that the FTF would still be available. The puzzle was intended to be challenging with red herrings but a systemmatic approach without over complicating the strategy was required. We have another in mind to test the grey matter.