Black Flag Geocaching Crew

One thing I do find greater than finding caches is hiding them. So far at this point I have hidden 7 caches and plan to hide more. The types of caches that I like the most are large ones as they are easy to find and normally not a lot of them exist around where I live. Most of the ones that we get around here are either nano or micro caches. There are some of course that are big enough for swag and travel bugs but in my opinion not enough of them. Hopefully a few will crop up soon enough that will change that a little and give other cachers more variety, anyway enough on that.

One thing I do so far when planning a hide is scouting out areas that appear to not get a lot of traffic from muggles, can be easily accessed and that hopefully others will enjoy. 5 out of 7 of mine are clip lock containers that are classed as small by geocache guidelines but know some people have labelled the same size containers in their cache hides as medium. The other 2 that I have out there are eclipse tins, one magnetic and the other in a tree. I hid mine based on what I had enjoyed finding when I went caching with my family and the types of caches I hid excluding the micros made it fun for everyone. 

My next location I actually want to put a cache in the middle of a roundabout which has plenty of tree coverage around it to protect it from being seen by cars or muggles passing by. Its a big roundabout and is in a place that doesn't get a lot of traffic so hopefully it will hang around for a long time. One of the other reasons for choosing this spot is that I can then hide a large cache that people will hopefully enjoy and spread the word of its existence. I have already built something for a container to be put in there but need to make a few changes to make it vandal proof just in case. 

Ever since we started Geocaching we have met other cachers, attend monthly meetings and go to events to meet others who are more experienced and also cache with them. Most people we have met discovered Geocaching through friends or family. We on the other hand discovered it a completely different way.

A few years ago my Wife and I were bored and as you do decided to hire a movie. The name of the movie was called. “Splinterheads”. The movie was released in 2009 and is about a carnival that comes to this town and Galaxy who is played by Rachael Taylor is one of the carnival folks who pretty much makes jabs at people to suck them into playing the carnival games. She ends up getting Justin played by Thomas Middleditch sucked in to having a crack at one of the games and then not long later they form a friendship. During one of their outings she introduces him to Geocaching and during the movie they go out and find caches together. Galaxy even explains some of the basic rules for playing Geocaching. When we saw this movie we decided to look it up online to find out whether this was a real thing that people did and of course soon discovered that it was. I did a little bit of research from what I had found at the time but obviously not good enough as at the time I only found an Australian site where the caches were a bit of a drive away and at the time weren't very many on the site. We of course discovered ages later that there was another site that if I had visited earlier could have got us started but I guess we just didn't realise what to look for at that point. 

Alot of people ask us how we came up with the name Black Flag and the short answer, Assassins Creed Black Flag. When we first started which was September 2015 we were trying to think of usernames. My son had watched me playing Assassins Creed Black Flag and likened Geocaching to it. Its pretty much similar only in the sense that in the game you travel around and find hidden objects and in Geocaching you travel around finding hidden objects. 

So the whole family adopted the name Black Flag followed by their own unique identity. Im Black Flag 78, my Wife is Black Flag Angel (she didn't pick Angel for the reason you may think) and my teenage son is Black Flag 001. We have our own individual accounts because we all do it at a different pace from each other. The best part is no matter where we go we always get to find a cache whether we visit friends, go to a park, a family outing and the list goes on and on.

I did look up Black Flag recently though in a search and discovered that the name is associated with the game where we came up with our name, a band called black flag and pirates of course. Thankfully we are just your run of the mill, down to earth, crazy family who use the name Black Flag like the adventurous Edward Kenway from Assassins Creed, the only difference of course, we find plastic containers, eclipse tins, magnetic bolts and various other containers with log books that we sign as proof we were there. What we dont do is wave swords around or shoot people to get to them.