Current at 11/6/2011 (Online waypoint URL) You have already found this cache! Master Index    Nearest Caches Not your average marsh! by OHMIC (1.5/1.5) (Archived) N50° 10.478  W97° 07.714 (WGS84) UTM  14U   E 633629  N 5559724 Use waypoint: GC2X4NH Size: Small    Hidden on 5/28/2011 In Manitoba, Canada Difficulty:     Terrain:                 Sandwich-sized Lock n Lock. Oak Hammock Marsh is home to 25 species of mammals, 300 species of birds, numerous amphibians, reptiles, and fish, and countless invertebrates. During migration season, the number of waterfowl using the marsh during migration can exceed 400,000 daily! Definitely not your average marsh!

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7/8/2011 by Kabuthunk
Not your average marsh... not your average find. This cache put up a fight and a half, and tried to take back something to boot! So after having cleared out all of the Northern caches in the marsh area, I decided to head back to the interpretive center and just… walk for a while. Head down some of the various trails, see where they take me, and maybe glance at the GPS every so often. If I happened to be close to a cache, sure, I'll go after it!

And thus why this cache was found… which turned out to have been my last find of the day. I parked at the interpretive center parking lot, and walked over down this trail. There was a metric ton of kids all having some kind of event of some sort in the area beside the center, but they weren’t paying me any attention, and vice versa, so it worked out well. Off I went, picking random route when I came to a fork in the path. This led me North to this cache, which after realizing I was 20 meters from the coordinates, quickly began searching for. I began much like Google Eyes below, and started out the hunt rock diving. After a few fruitless minutes of this, I came to the conclusion that OHMIC probably wouldn’t have wanted anyone to move the rocks around at the edge of the water (despite me putting them back where I picked them up from… no guarantee that others would as well), and abandoned that method of searching. Given the cache was only found three times so far, I didn’t think there would be much in the way of a ‘geotrail’ of any sort, but I did spot a few slightly more stepped on areas that could have led me to a cache find. Those could just as easily have been from random bystanders standing in an arbitrary place to look at something, but still, it gave me something to work with.

Beginning my hunt in just such a place, I kept my head low to see under the leaves, and parted various plants gently with my hands to see between them. After several minutes of this, I straightened up… and found that everything seemed… a lot brighter now somehow.

And then I realized… my sunglasses! And these aren’t just crap 10 dollar sunglasses… hell, those would be easy to find due to the size! No, these were basically just two polarized/tinted lenses connected with a tiny bit of metal with tiny magnets in it that clipped/magnetted to my prescription glasses! Not cheap (if even possible) to get the correct size for, since these glasses are about 4 years old! I quickly abandoned the search for the cache, and continued my search in the exact same location, except this time looking for something darker-ish, and significantly smaller and ridiculously thin.

Oh joy.

A good 5 minutes went by, but thankfully no people came down the trail (although a few got into one of the canoes to the South). I stepped out of my spot and retraced my steps from where I had put down my camelbak and geocaching kit, just in case it fell off early without me noticing somehow. Nope. Although, on the way back from said geocaching kit, I DID spot the cache, so at least I would get a find if nothing else . So I took a minor detour from my sunglasses hunt to sign and chainmail ball the cache, and replaced it as found. Back to the glasses!

Since they weren’t in my backtracking, I went back to the spot and continued to hunt, spotting absolutely nothing. Oh, this was going to be a bright drive back to the city. However, right as I was starting to get close to giving up, I spotted them not on the ground, but dangling from the branch of a bush by the nosepiece! WOOH! Although I only get one smiley, I basically consider this two finds for the price of one . A very stressful smiley perhaps, but at least I came out victorious. The funny part though is that I had thought I lost these same sunglasses in the city on Wednesday when meeting my wife for dinner a her workplace but was lucky that she found them today!

Took: Sunglasses
Left: Logbook entry and chainmail ball and almost sunglasses