Heltinnen has started to log her finds

During our big holiday this year, Heltinnen started wondering how many caches she had found. And after thinking a bit, the urge to figure it out became stronger and stronger. Eventually we decided that she should start logging all her finds, and log all caches we’ve found since we started. After all, she has signed the physical logs for a long time already.

After thinking a bit about how to do this, we realized that it just had to wait until I was finished logging all my finds. When I was done, we started the major job of figuring out which caches she had to log (since I’ve found some alone).

GSAK was the tool, and we started by making a clean database with a copy of all my finds. Then we removed all the caches Heltinnen already had logged (events etc). Then we removed caches we knew I found without Heltinnen. And parallel to removing, we also logged caches we were certain she had found.

To make it easier for ourselves, we started by logging all the finds outside of Norway – since it was easy to filter out the caches I have found alone. So for a short while, Heltinnen had over 90% of her finds outside of Norway!

All logs were made by using templates in GSAK, with small adjustments based on cache type. Challenge caches had documentation of qualifications added.

I have been geocaching as a part of “thomfre” since January 2012, and haven’t logged my finds online until now (October 2016), even though I created my own user and started signing physical logs a long time ago. To make my profile correct, I am logging all the caches I found together with thomfre. See his log for more specific details about this cache, and pictures if applicable 🙂

Sorry for the generic log, and thanks for the cache! 🙂

It is impossible to log so many caches quickly without using a generic log. We’re sorry we had to do it this way, but we feel that it’s acceptable when I write my logs the way I do 🙂

The amount of unlogged caches decreased constantly, and eventually we were left with some caches we had to go through cache by cache. We wanted to do this the right way, and there was no way we wanted to log a find that Heltinnen didn’t really find.

The last four caches took some time, but after studying pictures, logs and notes we finally managed to get everything logged. Almost everything, 5 of the caches have been locked since we found them. Some souvenirs are also missing; guess they had an expiration date…

As of this writing, Heltinnen has reached 9 315 caches found. Plus 100+ caches from this weekend that neither of us have had the time to log yet.

Heltinnen’s logs will from now on also be generic (with a few exceptions). But they will contain a link to my log, which will be more specific (as usual). We think this is perfectly okay, since we cache together, I write as much as I do, we upload a lot of pictures and we write on this blog. We recognize logs as an important reward for cache owners, and hope people will look at our combined logs before they judge us 🙂