THIS CACHE IS NOT AT THE LISTED CO-ORDINATES. The owner Shaun has given permission for the placement, but won't be able to assist. Please do it only in daylight hours.
Lockdown has certainly affected all citizens to some extent, some more than others. Most people will have experienced some form of withdrawal symptoms for example no cigarettes, alcohol or your morning fix of cappuccino. For myself being an outdoor person enjoying hikes, nature and of course geocaching those three words “Stay At Home” have left me experiencing withdrawal symptoms of the great outdoors. It also resulted in our longest slump (111 days) without a cache find.
Not having any geocaches to find within a 300 kilometer radius of our home, one suggestion to keep active with geocaching over the lockdown period was to try and solve puzzles. I must admit that solving puzzles is my least enjoyable aspect of geocaching and is left in the capable hands of my better half. So after a few feeble attempts decided that puzzle solving was not an attractive venture and I am not repudiating my claim that I do not enjoy puzzles, however I thought it may be a good opportunity of reinstating my creative ability to build puzzle boxes. After giving this some thought it felt like it would be a good idea to create a puzzle box and a puzzle at the same time. Putting on my thinking cap a plan was forming from a lesson in the science laboratory.
The Earth’s rotation Axis is not perpendicular to the plane in which it orbits the Sun. It is offset by 23.5 degrees. Earth rotates once in about 24 hours with respect to the Sun, but once every 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds with respect to other distant stars. The earth rotating once every 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds, called the sidereal period, and its circumference is roughly 40,075 kilometers. The surface of the earth at the equator moves at a speed of 460 meters per second. This rotation is responsible for creating centrifugal force.
The centrifugal force is very real if you are in a rotating reference frame. It causes objects in a rotating frame of reference to accelerate away from the center of rotation. Essentially, for an object moving in a circle, centrifugal force is the apparent force outward on the object.
Yep, an attractive plan was formulating in my mind and as there is no repudiating the fact that the earth is rotating on its axis and by reinstating that puzzle box creative ability the world was at my fingertips. The mission was set into motion, with many hours spent in the workshop shaping the field puzzle, that being the easy part. The more difficult being the time spent in front of the computer formulating the puzzle as it is not my forte, but gave it my best shot.
Fortunately, I had sufficient material in the workshop to complete the field puzzle as those three words “Stay AT Home” meant I could not pop out to a hardware shop and in any event they were also on lockdown. Three words used in three sentences was key to creating the puzzle and will be to solve the puzzle.
All you need to solve the puzzle is in the listing. I trust you will find this puzzle challenging, thought provoking and attractive enough to solve, all this said and done I am not repudiating the fact that puzzles are not my forte, so hopefully you will be enticed to solve it, now be adventurous by reinstating your puzzle solving abilities and give this one a go.
There is one final stage to solving this puzzle you will need to walk 270 meters at 271 degrees. Unfortunately when doing the final calculations it was incorrectly calculated presuming the earth was perpendicular on its axis and not rotating. In the calculation the walk took .2935 seconds longer based on using the speed at the equator.
Once you have solved the puzzle you will need to solve a field puzzle at ground zero to finally log this cache.
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.