We Have Our Winners!

Towards the end of last April we wanted to add a little spice to our geocaching fun, so we decided to put together a contest for our fellow geocachers. The contest involved the placement of 10 geocoins throughout the 4 counties around the Bay Area, and the rules were simple. All a contestant had to do was find one of the coins, pick it up and move it to another geocache within the same county it was originally placed in, then take a picture of him/herself with the coin and post it on that coin's webpage.

It turns out, this was easy to talk about, but when it came time to actually find the coin, it was exceedingly difficult. As the contest progressed, we ended up dropping replacement coins in order to keep the contest going. By the time the contest was finally finished by the first contestant, we had replaced 5 of the ten coins (that's a 50% attrition rate!).

So, we finally had two geocachers win the contest, with Captain Biggins coming in first and Embargo coming in a close second.


Here are our winners, Captain Biggins is on the left and Embargo is on the right.

We gave each of them a trophy we had made up, a large navigational geocoin and we also put together a booklet that contained posts of their 'finds' and 'didn't finds' in the web pages of the geocoins they were hunting. Also in the booklet are instructions on how to use the coins for real celestial navigation.
When I showed Embargo that one of his pictures was chopped up by the Captain and photoshopped in order to put Biggins' face on Embargo's body, we all got a big laugh.
Next, I showed Biggins the instructions for his coin.


And here is a close-up of the coins we gave them as an award. As you can see, these things are large, highly specialized coins. We are pleased with the outcome so far, and since the contest isn't officially over yet, we may have a third winner yet. There is one other contestant whom has moved 6 of the 10 coins so far, so there is a possibility that we may have another winner before the contest closes at the end of this month..