Monday, June 17, 2024

Redhorse Redux

With geocaches you can either go boring or high maintenance. 

For boring you use one of several standard geocache containers.  Things like film canisters, ammo boxes, or one of several commercially available waterproof containers.  And you put them somewhere predictable and sheltered.  Roadside signs in our part of the world are often supported by wooden 4 by 4 posts.  These posts have holes to, I suppose, deal with temp related expansion and contraction.  Film canisters fit neatly, but how boring.

I like to make custom containers and hide them in odd places.  Hence the Strange Fish series.  With considerable effort I've managed to catch enough weird, unloved fish to place ten geocaches.  One of which is Strange Fish 3 - Silver Redhorse.  

If you've never caught one, Silver Redhorse are a sort of sucker.  Not much good to eat but fun to catch and an indicator of good water quality.

They are kinda dopey looking, mostly because of the vacuum cleaner mouth, but have variable degrees of red color in their fins that makes them jaunty.


I've gone through three containers now at this geocache.  The first was hidden inside a chunk of wood....which was obliterated by brush clearing.  The second was a crafty bit of bark colored tubing that was attached to a gnarly shrub of similar texture.  When this lost its waterproofing abilities (a season or two of temperature extremes can do that) it was winter and I was busy. So I threw together a more or less fish shaped container with what I had on hand.  But I never liked it much and it too started to get damp inside.  That makes the geocache log hard to sign and is generally poor form.  So, down to the workshop.  My latest iterations are made of pvc pipe with snug end caps.  But can you make it look like a fish?

Here's container three below, underneath what I consider to be a much better version 4.0.  I even figured out a way to have surface texture similar to scales!


The fins are a bit over the top, but in part they are to keep the cache off the ground and hopefully a bit drier.  Construction technique is similar to the Strange Catfish cache but I'm with some effort getting better at this.

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