GAG9 - Night-caching in the sewers with Tripper & GrizzlyG(sorta)

So this Friday and Saturday were GAG9 (stands for Go and Get Em 9, a big geocaching event in Ottawa). I usually do a lot of the caches the night of the Friday with Tripper and Grizz. Grizz was indisposed that night, not having any modern forms of communication, and we were unable to link up with him, but we had fun none the less. One of the funnest ones for me was one out in the west end called Bridlewood Brain Teaser 2 . We heard from another group of cachers that the cache was simply not findable and that piqued our interest. "We can find the dang thing!" We thought. So we got there at about 9:30 or so, it's dark as all heck and we search for 15 minutes.. Nada... Nothing.. Uhh Uhh... I break out the description in my PDA. It says something about going 15 paces North and finding a surprise.. Well, 15 paces North was a big bunch of nothing, but 15 paces WEST was a big storm sewer. An UNLOCKED storm sewer (well, it had some fancy closing mechanism, but if you fiddled around with it, that sucker opened right up!!). I opened the grate up, looked at my GPS and by gum, that GPS arrow was pointing straight down that hole! So we all know what that means. Down the hole we go!!!

Luckily it was not a sewage sewer. It was brand-new storm sewer and very clean and only smelled a little bit. I was able to crawl down the hole into this inner chamber and there was a ladder there. This was 2 meters from the cache people!! I climbed up the ladder expecting to find the cache and!!!!!!

Nothing.... No geocache.. Shucks.. It's been my dream to put a geocache in a sewer drain for years, here I thought I was about to find one and durn it.. NOTHING!!!! But wait.. Perhaps the fun was not over yet.

As I clung to the ladder peering out the sewer grate I heard people coming by.. They were talking about meters.. These had to be geocachers. Time to have some fun.. I yelled from the sewer.
"Hey!!!! Can anyone hear me!!!!!" They ran over. After all, this man-hole is like, 2 meters from the posted cache co-ordinates.

"Hey! There's somebody in the sewer!" they said (or something deductive like that).

"Hey!" I yelled "Are you geocachers? Can you guys get that open from the other side! I'm stuck in here! I've been traveling the sewers for hours trying to get out!!" And they actually tried for a second, until one said "Hey, who is that!".

Turns out I knew them. We run into this group on the road every year! After they found out it was me, they stopped trying to pry it open(like it made perfect sense to them that I'd be in the sewer).. So I came back up and looked some more with this group with no luck again, then I did what I do when I can't find a geo-cache in this kind of situation. I went tactile and looked with my hands. I felt along the base of the boulder it might have been under and my fingers brushed plastic. The cache was in hand.. I was the first to find it, a FTF they say (second of the night. It's easier when there's like 47 new geocaches planted in the city!). This is very important to some crazed geocachers, who, if you'll excuse the analogy, liken it to defrocking a virgin. For the record, I do not(grin).

As I tell people when I talk to them about geocaching... It leads to you spots you've never been before. I never would have gotten to see the inside of that cool sewer if it hadn't been for that geocache!