Welcome to our third annual April Fool cache. This year April
1st falls on a Saturday and so we expect a good turnout from those
vying for the FTF honours. The series is designed so that you will
not be able to start your hunt until 00:01 a.m., Eastern Standard
Time on April 1st, 2006. All the necessary instructions to start
are on the TBP - Drip page.
Please note that if you are going to be doing this series at
night, some of the hunts may or may not take you close to people's
houses so do be considerate and suitably stealthy so as not to
cause problems and bring our sport into disrepute.
In order to find the final cache, as usual you will need to find
a series of other caches first to determine the final coordinates.
By the way, the published coordinates are the same as those for the
second annual event Geofellas April Fool Pub Night cache in
Stouffville on April 1st, 2006. If you are doing this cache on the
first day, you can gather there to share your experiences and
congratulate or commiserate with each other on the success or
otherwise of your efforts.
As with our previous two April Fool caches we shall continue to
keep the series "in play" for as long as possible after this
date
This year we are going to share with you another "joke" that our
government has played on us - the ongoing saga of "The Big Pipe".
In their efforts to pave over as much valuable Southern Ontario
farmland as possible, the powers-that-be have determined that they
need to provide significant extra sewage capacity for York Region.
To do this they have decided to install "The Big Pipe" deep (at
least 50m) underground to carry all the effluent down to Lake
Ontario. According to environmental lobby groups, in order to
construct this $870 million sewage pipe in the middle of a major
drinking water aquifer, the Region is de-watering the Oak Ridges
Moraine aquifer system, thereby depleting stream flows in the Rouge
Watershed. Dewatering has already occurred at a volume of 16 - 33
million litres per day for over three years and huge volumes of
precious groundwater are being piped into local streams or flushed
into the sanitary sewer system. Each
day, the Big Pipe drains one hundred million litres of
drinking water from the key underground water aquifer that feeds
the Humber, Don and Rouge Rivers in Toronto . Over 250,000 people
in the GTA rely on the Oak Ridges Moraine for their drinking water.
De-watering to facilitate construction of the Big Pipe has damaged
fish habitat and dried up private wells throughout York Region.
Some of this drinking water is discharged back into receiving
creeks that cannot assimilate volume and temperature fluctuations
brought on by the huge influx of water. The rest is dumped into the
sewer. Early last year the Government of Ontario approved the next
phase of the Big Pipe that allows a tripling of the amount of groundwater to
be pumped out of the aquifer system.
Your hunt will take you to some of the places that are or will
be affected by this foolishness.
There are 5 additional caches in the series, all of which you
will need to find in order to find a 6th container, which will
contain the instructions on how to find the final container for
this cache.
The 5 caches are:
TBP - Drip
TBP - Drip, Drip
TBP - Drip, Drip, Drip
TBP - Drip, Drip, Drip, Drip
TBP - Drip, Drip, Drip, Drip, Drip
Although these will all be published before April 1st (so that
our ever patient cache approver will not be imposed upon to release
them at midnight), you will not be able to find them until we post
the starting instructions here at 00:01 a.m., Eastern Standard Time
on April 1st, 2006. These instructions will lead you to to
TBP - Drip and, in that cache, you will find
the instructions on how to find the next 4. In each of these 5
caches (either inside the lid or elsewhere on the container) you
will find a letter or letters which you should note down
carefully and then perform the calculation described below to
determine the location of the 6th container. Any one letter will
appear only once. In the 6th container you will find the
instructions on how to find the final. We have pulled no punches
this year - we believe that these caches will mostly be pretty
difficult to find for various different reasons and so the
overall difficulty has been set at 5.
For each letter you find in the lids of the first 5 caches, get
the numerical value from the table below. Add all these numbers
together, divide the result by 1000 and then add the new result to
both the North and West of the following set of meaningless
coordinates - N 43° 58.264', W 079° 14.218'. This will enable you
to find the 6th container.
Letter Code
Table |
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
74 |
26 |
38 |
29 |
87 |
45 |
81 | |
H |
I |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
18 |
84 |
34 |
97 |
26 |
9 |
7 | |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
S |
T |
U |
10 |
97 |
35 |
40 |
5 |
74 |
10 | |
|
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
|
000 |
90 |
75 |
50 |
55 |
66 |
000 | |
To give you ample opportunity to prepare for this cache we have
published it at least a week before it goes live. We don't want you
to be trying to solve puzzles while you are out in the field so we
are making sure that you have plenty of time to finish the
following 4 Sudokus. We know you might be keen to set out
right at 00:01 a.m., Eastern Standard Time on April 1st, 2006 if
you are going for FTF..
Puzzle Number 1
Puzzle Number 2
Puzzle Number 3
Puzzle number 4