Current at 11/6/2011 (Online waypoint URL) You have already found this cache! Master Index    Nearest Caches Viva la Smiley! by Madrugada (1.5/1.5) N50° 00.694  W96° 52.815 (WGS84) UTM  14U   E 651874  N 5542070 Use waypoint: GC1G3Z1 Size: Small    Hidden on 9/8/2008 In Manitoba, Canada Difficulty:     Terrain:                           A small Lock&Lock in Bird's Hill Park. Park pass required. This should be an easy find. The container is not camo'd, so be careful to re-hide it well with the natural surrounding camo. Camo tape will be added later if deemed necessary. This is my first hide. Hopefully more to come. Cache contains FTF certificate, log book and some very small trade items - including mini mechanical pencils that are the perfect size for a small cache! At the request of Manitoba Conservation, the coordinates of the trail running near the cache have been posted. Please tread lightly in this area so that no new damage is done to the environment. This park is a wonderful asset to have so close to the city.

Additional Hints (There are no hints for this cache)

6/14/2009 by Kabuthunk
The third cache of 15 for the day! And if you're familiar with the type of logs I post on here (of which you will assumingly learn shortly), that's a heckuva lot for me! It's actually a new record, beating my old record of 12 back in 2006.

But anyway, the third cache of the day. At first, I wasn't sure what order I'd be doing caches in, or which ones... but at the time of going after this specific cache, I figured I'd only be tackling maybe 5 tops, and just taking it easy for the day. Yeah, obviously that didn't happen... but I only figured I'd kick it up a notch at around cache 8 . What SPECIFICALLY drew me to this cache was actually what appears to be a bit of a mapping error on my GPS. With the Topo map I have on my GPS, it seems to be under the belief that this cache is sitting on one of 7 small islands in the middle of a vaguely bigish lake. What memories I have of the last time being at Bird's Hill, I didn't remember the lake I was wadding in to be big enough for islands... let alone 7 of them... but my memory is kinda sketchy at best sometimes . Hence... I headed over towards this cache just for the sake of seeing if I would be able to wade my way to the "island", or if I had to swim... would I be up the challenge of swimming, but not having a change in shorts for the remainder of the day.

By the time I started to near the water, I had almost convinced myself that if I had to swim, I would. However, once I reached the water, I didn't see a single island in the middle of it! Biking along the edge (which seems to be in the middle of being re-paved... most of it is just semi-packed dirt right now), I quickly found a paved trail that lead towards the coordinates. Peculiar, I thought... but maybe in the wettest parts of spring, it might flood over the path. But I doubted it.

Oh well... no swimming for me today (although I DID wade in the water just off that cement pier for about 20 minutes after finding the cache... so refreshing !). Off I biked towards the cache. Once I got near, I hooked down a trail closer to ground zero and propped the bike up against a tree. Doing a quick walk-around of the area, I came to a conclusion as to where the cache had to be hidden (however, not having read the cache description beforehand, I was only speculating). Several minutes worth of preliminary searching turned up nothing. Expanding my search a little bit in either direction still turned up nothing. After having poked and prodded my fingers into as many places that looked cache-fittable as possible, I started to head back to my bike, in the expectation of checking my Palm Pilot for the description and perhaps previous logs or hints. However, about 8 feet from my bike, I stopped and just looked around for a little bit. Wouldn't you know it, the sun JUST happened to be creeping through all the trees, and laid a nice band of light just across the corner of the cache that was visible from where I was standing. The glint had caught my eye, and seconds later I had the cache in hand .

A quick hunting later, and I tossed in a chainmail ball and signed up the logbook. Thanks for placing a cache on this "island". At the bare minimum, that aspect alone caught my attention . But yeah... there needed to be a cache out by the water here. Definitely awesome scenery around these parts .

Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and chainmail ball