Shaft! Multi-Cache

Who’s the man? Shaft! Can you dig it?

Don’t worry, there’s no ‘digging it’ required to retrieve this cache – and to be honest it’s absolutely nothing to do with John Shaft either – but it will take you to SHAFTsebury Lake, one of Swindon’s often overlooked pretty little nature havens.

The cache is a multi-parter – the initial co-ordinates will take you to a micro, which contains the co-ordinates to the final cache.

In all, not including searching time, you could do the round trip and be back to your car in around half an hour, a little longer with children or if you just fancy taking a slower stroll.

The parking co-ordinates are in Shaftesbury Avenue, this is a residential area but there is plenty of parking space.

Once parked up, cross the wooden bridge (important, or you’ll end up on the wrong side of the River Cole – which is more like a little brook than a river at this point but still tricky to cross), and you’re ready to go...

In between the micro and the final cache you’ll find a nice playground (the open one, not the one surrounded by a silver fence, which has been closed for renovation). This makes this cache particularly child friendly as the kiddies can have a nice play in between the two stages.

(Don’t worry though, neither cache is close to or in eyesight of the play park, I wouldn’t place a cache close to a children’s playground for obvious reasons – not a good place to be rustling through bushes in a suspicious manner!)

Here are a few photos of the lake and the play park (action shots by one of the junior Chaos Crew members):

The cache initially contains a good selection of small sized swaps (I was surprised how much I could fit in there actually), a FTF pin for whichever one of you is fastest off the blocks, and a travel bug. I’ll visit it from time to time and re-stock it if necessary.

A couple of notes:

• Most of the route is on good, dry and level paths, but the final approach to the cache is over grass which can sometimes get waterlogged, so welly boots are advised, and if you are bringing a buggy it needs to be a fairly robust one that can handle a bit of off-road activity
  
• Please be discrete when retrieving the micro as the spot is overlooked by flats
  
• And pretty please be extra careful to firmly replace the lid on the main cache, be sure that it clicks into place all around the lid, as otherwise it will let in water