SOG #1021 is now SOMKT #1 (SkySite On My Kitchen Table)!
TAZ and his FTF Texas SOG (First to find
SkySite On Ground in Texas)
After Will's attempt at this, I knew I'd
have to find the land owner and get permission to get to the recovery site. My
wife made several phone calls to find the owner. I got in touch with him about
9:00pm, last night. He said as long as I wasn't hunting deer, he had no qualms
about me going over the fence. He even offered to come and meet me there, but
since I'd be rolling up about midnight, I told him not to worry about it.
The recovery itself came off without a hitch.
One of the biggest differences between this and geocaching is that cache
hiders usually access some sort of trail to get close to the cache site. These
satellites have no respect for pedestrian limitations so you have to kind of
shift gears from "If I were hiding a cache here..." to "If I
were falling out of the sky...". You also don't have to figure out what
camo the hider may have used on a Bison tube, in the woods, since there's a 5
foot, blaze orange parachute attached to the communication box.
We hopped over the gate and saw four huge deer, (bigger than any I've ever
seen in East Texas), go trotting off from near the house. Taz and I walked a
dirt road to within 650 feet of the target. We had about 100 feet of open
meadow before we got to the woods. There were massive amounts of sticker-ivy
growing over itself all along the edge of the trees. We, (okay, Taz), found a
"tunnel" through the briar patch that we could crawl through. I'm
thinking this is a coyote path.
Once into the tree cover, the ivy thinned out and it was easy going all the
way to the recovery area. We were walking pretty fast so I overshot ground
zero by about 50 feet before my GPSr caught up. After letting it settle down,
I started working my way back. With the tree cover, I figured it probably
didn't make it to the ground. I found the box hanging at eye level with the
parachute caught in the tree above. I had to convince a few paper wasps that
this was not going to be their winter home. I climbed up, untangled the 'chute
and lowered it to the ground with my snake hook. This was a situation where
waypointing your car and using the GPSr's "bread crumb" trail were
essential. Unlike geocaching there is no, "Oh, there's the trail"
after you make the find.
I had a load of fun on this. I kind of thought of it as a mystery cache with
the puzzle being finding the land owner. I spent more time deciphering
"Command Control" than cracking cracking the land ownership mystery.
This was less driving than I did for a DNF on "Nanocache", (three
trips to Benbrook). The coords were dead on and I'll get some cash to offset
the cost of gas.
Needless to say, I'll do it again.
Michael M. 10/20/04
Mark J. Phillips
SS Recovery Services LLC