Dam

Donna and I piled into Joan’s car this morning and drove back to up to the Modoc Trail in McCormick County to find the one that got away last weekend. We had received an unsolicited hint from the CO after he read our DNF log. We might have just chalked this cache up to a loss and moved on, but this is the first stage of a multi with about 16 stages that takes you on a tour all around the state of South Carolina. We figure we have lived here long enough that just maybe it is time for us to explore the place a bit and see what this state has to offer.*

*Imagine this sentence rendered in the sarcasm font.

The hint turned out to be no help because it told us to look somewhere we had already looked, but we had to give it try anyway. Seeing as we drove all that way and came up empty handed we tried a couple more caches over by Thurmond Dam. The first one we looked for was listed as kid friendly, so we figured we shouldn’t have any trouble with it. Wrong, apparently it was adult un-friendly as we came up empty handed.

There was one other cache, a short three stage multi, that was also on the South Carolina side of the base of the dam. Stage 1 was easy, but at stage two you needed to get a date that was to be found on top of a stone column for the coords for Stage 3. Unfortunately there was no plaque on top, just a metal lid with a padlock covering the column. We got the north coordinates by counting the flood gates, but still needed the two digits of a day in July 1980 to add to the last three digits in the Stage 1 west coordinates to get the final stage’s west coords. Being patriotic Americans we started by plugging in the number generated by using July 4, 1980. That took us to the middle of the parking area for a boat ramp. Hmmm, no good. So I created a waypoint for the first of July and then another for the 31st. Because we had the north coordinates the cache had to lie somewhere on a line between July 1st’s waypoint and the 31st’s waypoint. Knowing that, and reading the clue, it allowed us to make the find, with Joan making the actual grab. Time constraints sent us home after this so we could up our Find/DNF ratio.

This afternoon the Emperor got a transfusion and had his socks swapped with his gloves (oils change and tire rotation.)