This series of 65 puzzle caches has been placed to celebrate the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. Each ring is set by different cachers and contains 11 or 12 hides plus a bonus. The whole design is over 4km across. You will need to find all caches for a ring in order to find the bonus and complete the ring.
There are three Medal caches above the rings, Bronze, Silver and Gold. See the Bonus cache descriptions for how to find them. See the Gold Medal cache page for full series credits.
The Sussex Olympics Rings Team is: NogNod, Tootsie's Trackers, Cachedragon, Martletsman, ProfTonks, AnTsInRpAnTs & Lost!
You can do all the black ring caches in a single walk. It's not a loop, but it should link with caches in the yellow and green rings. If you do the black ring caches in reverse order, you'll have to double back for the bonus.
This series is now featured in issue 10 of The Seeker the magazine of the Geocaching Association of Great Britain. See this link
PUZZLE
To solve this puzzle you need to find the area (in square km) covered by the olympic rings that are made by the published co-ordinates.
Hard core version.
The hard core mathematicians amongst you need only the following information :
1) The radius of each ring is 0.62km
2) Each ring is made of 14 equally spaced points, and the overlap between adjacent rings is 4 points (or 3/14ths of the whole circle)
Maths nerds read no further, go to it.
OK, so I’m not allowed to leave it at that, because you need at least A level maths to sort that out. For those geocachers without a mad passion for geometry, here is the normal version :
Normal version.
1) The radius of each ring is 0.62km
2) The area of each of the 4 overlap zones is 0.1428Km (see workings out image).
Calculate the area covered by the 5 rings and write it as A.BC square Km
Round up to the nearest 0.01 square km, i.e. if the answer was 3.456, round up to 3.46. The formula for the area of a circle is pi x radius x radius.
Co-ords N51 0(A-B) . (A+B)(C+2)A , W 000 0(C-1) . (B-2)B(A+B)
For this puzzle the geocheck allows +/- 3m of accuracy