[HeliDood]

I received an email from TC this afternoon, it said,

“This is to inform you that your sponsor, ‘*****’, has revoked your sponsorship. If this is a surprise, you’ll need to ask them about it. I’m just an automated bot, and don’t understand humans or any of the things they do. Without sufficient sponsorship, your access to the site has been restricted. You must have two qualified members sponsoring you for full access. I’m sorry for the unfortunate inconvience, but this is a natural part of the process in a sponsorship based community.

I believe this might have been an automated message that has to do with the site closing, and really has nothing to do with my sponsorship being “revoked”

[HeliDood]

@CodeJunkie wrote:

without some kind of nudge it’s not one I’d even think about solving.

I’ll tell you what then, I can give you a nudge. I’ll explain it.

HUGE spoiler warning here. If you don’t like spoilers, stop reading now.

The only hint anyone needs is right on the cache page. “Be sharp and count to three” It’s a subtle hint for most, but should be a dead give away to anyone who understands music.

In music, we have notes. A through G, and sharps and/or flats in between.
We need to focus on ONLY sharps in this puzzle.

All the notes: (the # sign means ‘sharp’)
A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, then back to A and repeat.

Notice there is no B# or E#. They don’t exist. Picture what a piano keyboard looks like. See the black keys? See how there are gaps in the black keys? The black keys are in groups of two and three the whole length of the piano. Those gaps are where the notes B# and E# WOULD exist, but like I said, they don’t exist.

Back to B#. Since there is no such thing as B#, we’d simply go to the very next note, a C natural.

The hint “be sharp and count to three” means precisely “C = 3” So now we should have a good idea of how the number system might work.

A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, and so on.

So now for the reading music part. I understand not everyone knows how to read music. I kept it simple for a reason.

Beginning music students, usually elementary level, learn a simple acronym for memorizing the names of notes on a staff:
Every Good Boy Does Fine. Those letters, EGBDF are the names of the notes for each LINE, starting from the bottom.

For the spaces between those lines, starting at the bottom, the notes are FACE. (no acronym, since face should be easy to remember)…

For this puzzle, that should be all a person needs to know.. Look at the notes on the staff, find the name of the note (a letter), convert that letter to a number.

I hope this helps.

[HeliDood]

I didn’t know that, Jim. Obviously I knew you found it November 1st, but was unaware it was part of the LCG at the time. I didn’t realize it was a Lonely cache until I looked at it today.

So, thanks Jim (and every other cacher in Wisconsin who avoided my cache for 6 whole months) for making my cache lonely. And congratulations to you for being the first to find it as an LC. (I hear thats worth some mad crazy points in the LCG).

I don’t know what it is about that cache that everyone is so afraid of it.. I suppose because it is a music puzzle. I guess it looks more complicated than it ism because it really isn’t.

I realize now that Music puzzles aren’t very geocache-friendly.. Believe it or not, there is an ammo can sitting in the woods (that I placed) chock full of swag, that has been sitting there for a year!
I began working on composing an original piece of music that would fit a (fairly) complicated puzzle.. I’m about 90% finished with it.. I lost my motivation to complete it after I saw how unpopular music puzzles really are. I think I told you about this Jim a few months back.
I don’t know what I’ll do with that cache.

[HeliDood]

By saying “Halloween And Cemeteries” you reminded me of a cache I found near the town of Rome, WI.

GC217KG

Someone had decorated someone’s grave for Halloween with cheesy decorations.. Then apparently forgot all about it.

I discovered the decorated grave in mid-March when I was seeking out another cache. It was kind of an odd thing to see in March, in a cemetery of all places.

[HeliDood]

@BigJim60 wrote:

How about Biron Pleasure Island and Island Micro? Is the island even above water?

The water level between Biron and Whiting never got very high. They wouldn’t let it. Had the water level above the Biron dam been a foot or two higher, I think there would have been a disaster.

I haven’t been to the island, but I’m confident those caches are OK.

[HeliDood]

@sandlanders wrote:

“Dood! Where’s your cache?”

I still can’t get over to the east side pool cache. They’ve got signs all over, “Park closed until further notice”. To look for a matchstick container isn’t worth getting a fine.
I’m not too optimistic about that one anyways. Waterproof matchstick containers float, and it was only hidden under some very small rocks. Chances are it is gone. But I still want to look so I know there isn’t a piece of “geotrash” sitting around.

Whats crazy, is I visited the cache the day before the water came over the wall. I checked the log, closed it back up and rehid it. No way did I expect the water to get as high as it did. Had I known, I would have taken it home with me.

I enabled “Down By The Riverside” yesterday. I was finally able to go check on it. I feared that one was washed away and floated away.
I was surprised to not only the container right where I left it, but also not a single drop of water inside despite being under several feet of water for a few days.

The ammo can has a thick coat of mud on it, which adds to the camouflage. A lot of the vegetation that was concealing the cache has been washed away. Its still very muddy down there.

[HeliDood]

Who knows of my “Down by the Riverside” cache in Nekoosa?
Its an Ammo can, but I’m still a bit concerned it floated up and ended up in the Petenwell

[HeliDood]

I forgot about SCUBA caches… Thats special equipment, but is it required? probably not. I think most healthy people should be able to swim 30 feet underwater simply by holding their breath without any specialized equipment.

GCW9KE Broken Dam is, according to the cache description, in no more than 15 feet of water. Sounds easy enough. I see previous finders have found it with Snorkel gear. I bet with determination I could find it with less.

Nifty Fifty GC1187E, based on the pictures, looks to be a bit more of a challenge than Broken dam. How deep is the water at GZ?

I was thinking more about island caches.
Because Wisconsin’s waters are neither Shark or Gator infested, a boat is never required because swimming is always an option.
No special equipment is required for swimming, is there?

[HeliDood]

Then here is a site you might like.

http://extreme-caching.com/

They’re all REAL 5 star ★★★★★ Terrains… None of this 5 star Wisconsin stuff.

I don’t believe there is a single genuine 5-star terrain in this entire state.

[HeliDood]

Disregard…

I just read this:

It was all about the numbers after all…
…as in the number of hours in a day I have for stuff. Unfortunately, not very many of those hours go towards website development.

I was laid off from my job in 2005, and eventually got a temp job at a local company. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot to do, but with virtually unfettered internet access and plenty of extra time, I decided to hone my PHP skills and developed a way that would let me take in a GPX file and verify what pages were completed for the Wisconsin DeLorme Challenge cache. after that was up and running, someone made a post in the Groundspeak forums about stats and the game not being about the numbers, and as a joke, registered itsnotaboutthenumbers.com and posted a link proving the point.

Soon after, I had the idea to reuse my DeLorme code to take the GPX file I read and derive some simple stats. The I added more stats. And more stats. The site got the blessing from Groundspeak. More people started using INATN. The servers went down. The site was moved to a dedicated server host, funded by Groundspeak. Things were good.

Then I got my old job back, and between that and a third child, I didn’t have time to develop the site any further, but I did what I could to keep it going. Eventually, new cache types were added. Attributes were added to the GPX format. I patched things up here and there, but someone always managed to come up with a strange case that resisted all attempts to make it work.

I finally made a difficult decision: With no time to give INATN the attention it deserves, and new (and better) stat solutions out there, I’ve decided to close down the site. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who helped support this effort over the past several years, especially the wonderful folks at Groundspeak and everybody who either donated via Paypal or clicked on one of the links. It’s been fun working on this and seeing the varied reactions from stat-hounds and stat-haters alike.

Thanks again, and see you on the trail!

-Dave Krug (aka The Cheeseheads)

[HeliDood]

@Team Black-Cat wrote:

???
Looks fine to me.

Yep, same here

[HeliDood]

A Wisconsin geocacher, “Firemonkee” has a geocache eBay store.
http://stores.ebay.com/firemonkeescachecloset?refid=store&sspagename=domain

They sell these little “critter” cache containers. Firemonkee has a series called the Critter Chronicles. More or less they’re nano’s hidden in the woods. (and a few of them, from my experience, were a PITA to find).

They sell some other containers on their store as well.
Like this one 😯
http://cgi.ebay.com/GEOCACHING-1-Nano-Revenge-Micro-Tree-Branch-Cache-/220494800678?cmd=ViewItem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item335683a726

What it looks like to me is having a geocache eBaY store could help pay to fill your car up with geoGas on those out-of-town caching trips.

[HeliDood]

He mentions a foot bridge in the auction description. Thats probably what he meant.

[HeliDood]

Anyone?

[HeliDood]

I was not aware of that.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105793/quotes?qt0405518

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