Current at 11/6/2011 (Online waypoint URL) You have already found this cache! Master Index    Nearest Caches Marsh Management by OHMIC (2/2) N50° 13.559  W97° 08.321 (WGS84) UTM  14U   E 632765  N 5565415 Use waypoint: GC2X4N6 Size: Small    Hidden on 5/28/2011 In Manitoba, Canada Difficulty:     Terrain:                 A short 2 stages multi-cache (ppuzzle) in a quiet area of the marsh. The first stage is a sign where you find the answers for the final. Oak Hammock Marsh is intensively managed to mimic the natural flood and drought cycle of a prairie wetland. The marsh is divided in four sections or cells, each with its own water control structures. To achieve its most productive stage, a marsh has to be drained out periodically to allow organic matter a chance to decay and vegetation to re-establish. If water levels are maintained at a constant level, marsh vegetation will eventually drown and the cell may become devoid of emergent growth and pondweeds. The cell must then be drawn down so it dries out again to allow the vegetation to re-establish. It can then be re-flooded for seven to ten years before it needs another draw down. To find this cache: Most of the 47,000 hectare of the original St.Andrews bog has been drained. All but how many hectares of the bog was drained to form Bedson Lake? Subtract this number from the North coordinates. To achieve its most productive stage, a marsh must have this proportion in percentage of vegetation and open water. Add this percentage to the West coordinates. You should now have all the information needed to find the final cache.

Additional Hints (There are no hints for this cache)

7/8/2011 by Kabuthunk
Fourth cache of the day! I was actually highly debating whether to go after this one or just leave it, due to its puzzle aspect. Not having looked at any of the cache descriptions before heading over (I created the pocket query and loaded it like… 5 minutes before leaving the apartment), I didn’t have anything solved ahead of time. And since I’m a paperless cacher, many puzzles aren’t solvable through my palm pilot and cachemate.

I figured however that I’d give it a shot anyway… who knows, see if I can solve it in the field without any resources otherwise. If after reading the cache description however it turned out to take TOO much time, I’d have probably left it just to avoid being eaten by horseflies ( the mosquitoes were generally being blown away by the breeze, but those damn horseflies are just too powerful for the bit of wind that was around). So cracking open my palm pilot, I found that I was barely able to make out the text due to it being exceedingly bright outside. Thankfully, there was a convenient path leading up to that mystery house shack thing there… that looks strangely brand newly built and unfinished… inside of which I hoped to get some shade.

Walking up to said building, I knocked on the door, not being sure if this was some… guide rest house or something, and nobody answered. Not locked either it seems. I opened it up, and found… that there were a whole lot of open windowless windows on the opposite side of the house. Well… had I walked around it, I would have easily seen that it was empty. So, I found that inside of there was VERY nice and cool. Tons of shade, a nice strong breeze was coming through the windows, and… I discovered that there was of course a metric ton of horseflies in here. It seems that they hadn’t spotted me yet, and were staying on the ceiling.

I quickly read the cache description and jotted down on a notepad the instructions for solving it. With the instructions readily available, I headed out of the house thing and back to the information stand where I was to obtain my needed information. It only took me several minutes (although I did take the time to read over all of the plaques regardless… I likes information ), and I had solved the final coordinates. Although I’ve gotta say it was very convenient for this to be solvable with so few numbers available on the information pages… you didn’t exactly have many digits to work with on there.

So heading over to the final coordinates, I found… that the location of the cache put up a fight and then some! Although, at first I did chuckle a bit to myself at all of the steps I had taken to this point to solve the puzzle… when you find the cache and read this, you’ll probably know why. So I hunted. And hunted. And hunted. MAN but that cache was putting up a fight to be found! I must have spent a good 15 minutes searching as high as possible (not that there’s much that’s very high in a marshland in general) and low as possible. Absolutely nothing came to view. Towards the end, I was starting to get kinda close to outright ending it and calling it a DNF… but it takes a lot more time than that (or a lot more mosquitoes… and the horseflies were still for some reason leaving me alone for the better part). After what seemed like an exceedingly long time of searching, I happened to just be standing at the right place and looking at the right angle for it to just… be there.

Well crap! How in the world did I manage to miss that throughout the rest of my search? I could have SWORN I looked over there before… but well… obviously I didn’t . Very thankful at having found the container at long last, I opened it up and signed it. Replacing it as found, I hope the next person isn’t nearly as blind as I was for this one. At this point the horseflies decided to take a strong interest in me… so it was about time to move along to the next cache.

Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and chainmail ball