With the Easter school holidays upon us, it was a perfect time for a short trip up to Norfolk to visit my mum. Whilst we had made no plans to do any geocaching as such whilst we were there, it would have been rude not to have slipped in a cheeky one… like you do. My mum was of the same mind and after the obligatory egg hunt on Easter Sunday morning mum suggested we could head to Wells for a nice walk on the beach… oh and there was that Earth cache there too. Perfect.
We had thought about attempting the earth cache back in February when Sam and I had visited but the weather had beaten us back off the sand. This time, the skies were mostly clear and the sun was shining, much to the annoyance of the weather man who had forecasted clouds and cool winds all weekend… pah, what do weathermen know.
The theme for the earth cache is to learn all about tides and in order to claim the find you have to walk out along the beach to the water line at low tide and take a few measurements. I thought this would be a 10 minute walk or so from the steps near the car park but it actually turned out to be over 2km! The tide sure does go out a long way at Wells. Surprisingly the terrain on our walk was quite varied. I expected it to be a constant flat plane of sand all the way but we experienced everything from soft fine sand to squelchy muddy stuff, to undulating dunes including one that surely remains as an island even when the tide comes back in, to rutted gravelly sand and gullies of water still stubbornly refusing to retract with the rest of the sea. It wasn’t until the last 300 metres or so that we finally came upon the nice flat hard packed sand that was easy to walk on.
About A Buoy
It was important to get our timings right so that we arrived at the water when the tide was at its lowest point and so some studying of the tides tables or more accurately a handy website, was needed. We arrived at the water with about 15 minutes to spare and so spent a little time playing noughts and crosses in the sand with my white cane. I also inscribed my caching name just in case any other geocachers came to log the earth cache that day. 😉
Tic-Tac-Tide
At the appropriate time we logged our position as a waypoint so we could calculate the exact distance that the water had retracted from the shore and then set about heading back to land. It wasn’t a very difficult earth cache but the walk there and back was very enjoyable indeed, if a little longer than we had expected.
If the tide turns, you’ll stay that way…or was that wind?
I wonder if there are any other earth caches based on tides. Have you done one perhaps?
This caching adventure took place on Sunday 5th April 2015 and took our geocache count to 1008
Not giggling at the fact you thought it would be a short walk. Oh-no, not at all! 😉
It’s a wonderful walk though! I take my hat off to you for getting it done, Earth caches require too much for my short attention span to cope with.
What a great way to burn off all that chocolate 🙂
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I can hear you snickering. I agree that most earthcaches need too much brain power but this one isn’t too bad 🙂
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As you know I love Earthcaches have done a couple based on tides, sand and water. If you asked me a couple of years ago what a Tombola was I would have shrugged but now, Tombola in the making was at the start of a 1 hour walk along the beach to a beautiful valley (GC3TTCY) the next one was Holey Tombola this was down a very steep hill, this one was a Tombola and a Rock Bridge (GC42PEF) and How you dune measuring erosion on a massive sand dune, Lake Wainamu (GC42HZZ) that was quite an involved with waypoint averaging, who knew they existed? No thigh master was needed after those three 🙂
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It was a harder walk than i expected. Shar was complaining that her thighs were burning by the end
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I hear her 🙂
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Well done on the Earthcache! We always find them interesting.
We’ve done another tide-based earthcache on the causeway to Cramond Island, on the coast between Edinburgh and the Forth Bridge. It’s GC3XNMG. And there are another two caches on the island itself but it’s a half-hour walk, and quite slippery.
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