OpenCaching North America Geocaching Blog

OCNA bucks the worldwide downward trend in new caches in 2015

January 5, 2016January 5, 2016 OpenCaching North America Leave a comment

On December 11th, 2014, this blog reported that there was a noticeable decline in new cache placements in most (but not all) Countries in the world in 2014 vs. 2013. This was using Geocaching.com numbers (as given by project-gc.com), because lets face it, they probably have a 95% worldwide market share of Geocaching listings. Well, those numbers were down again in 2015, and that’s from the bad 2014 numbers! Just as an example, the numbers for the United States were:

2013: 211,986 new caches
2014: 161,659 new caches, down 24% from 2013
2015: 149,986 new caches down, 7% from 2014

You can see from our previously linked to blog post from Decemember 2014, that we too at OCNA were feeling this trend, with 2014 being the worst year of our existence, as defined by new cache placements. Well, we decided to buck the trend in 2015, and in a big way, per the bar graph. We had our 3rd best year, with 440 new caches published! And we really blew up in Canada, as 77 of those caches were located there, as opposed to only 4 in 2014. We attribute this 149% increase to gaining quite a few enthusiastic new users who created a lot of caches, by our standards. Some, but certainly not all of them coming over from Garmin’s opencaching.com site, which was on life support for a couple of years, and finally passed away in August, 2015. We also had our 2nd annual site run contest running the entire month of August, that certainly helped as well. We plan on having a third annual contest in August, 2016, and who knows, maybe more contests.

We thank all our users for helping us to buck the trend. Please help us to do it again in 2016!!

BIT Caching (and the relaunch of bitcaching.com)

December 11, 2015December 11, 2015 OpenCaching North America 1 Comment

If you’re a regular user of our website, you have surely heard of BIT Caches. They currently comprise a little over 10% of our active listings. We recently acquired the bitcaching.com domain and it’s small associated website from our founder, Jerry AKA RvRoadTrip, so we figured a blog post about BIT caching was in order. BIT is an acronym that stands for Bound ID Tag, to represent that the game piece is bound in plastic, or laminated. Although it doesn’t necessarily have to be, waterproof self-adhesive media (i.e. sticker paper) has become the norm for the smartphone GPS game Munzee, and it can easily be used for BIT caching as well. Want to learn more about BIT caching? Read on!

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12 more OCNA Challenge Caches released!

November 19, 2015November 19, 2015 OpenCaching North America Leave a comment

We have released 12 more of our site owned locationless type challenge caches, for a total of 42 at this time. You can expect more in the future as well. Several of them are named “Variety Show”, and pertain to hiding some or all of the 14 different types of caches available on our site. Tentative plans call for about 30 more, and it should be obvious Variety Show challenges that pertain to finding some or all of the the 14 different types will be among them. The 12 newly released caches also include seasonal finding challenges, and FTF challenges. They are all linked to below, along with a short explanation of their requirements.

OCNA Challenge Cache – First To Find Hound (Level 1) – OU0935 (Be the FTF on 10 OCNA caches.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – First To Find Hound (Level 2) – OU0936 (Be the FTF on 20 OCNA caches.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Seasonal Cacher (Winter) – OU0937 (Find OCNA listed caches hidden in the months of December, January, and February.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Seasonal Cacher (Spring) – OU0938 (Find OCNA listed caches hidden in the months of March, April, and May.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Seasonal Cacher (Summer) – OU0939 (Find OCNA listed caches hidden in the months of June, July and August.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Seasonal Cacher (Fall) – OU093A (Find OCNA listed caches hidden in the months of September, October and November.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Ultimate Monthly Cacher – OU093B (Find a OCNA listed cache a month for 12 months.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Variety Show Hider (Level 1) – OU093C (Hide 4 different cache types.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Variety Show Hider (Level 2) – OU093D (Hide 8 different cache types.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Variety Show Hider (Level 3) – OU093E (Hide 12 different cache types.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Variety Show Hider (Level 4) – OU093F (Hide all 14 different cache types.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Variety Show Extravaganza – OU0940 (Hide and find all 14 different cache types.)

Only the lonely (New OCNA challenge caches released)

October 24, 2015November 19, 2015 OpenCaching North America 1 Comment

On April 28th, 2015, one week to the day after the most popular Geocaching website in the world imposed a one year moratoriam on new challenge caches, we at OpenCaching North America introduced our own. As the banner above says, they are Locationless, so to speak. If you qualify, you can log it. They are owned by a special Admin account, OCNAChallenges, and are all Unknown (?) type caches. They are presented as Geo Art in the Gulf of Mexico. We released 12 on that day, April 28th, 2015, and released 8 more on May 6th, 2015. And then, nothing. We are a small, all volunteer organization, we got busy! We hosted an After GeoWoodstock event in Maryland. We planned, ran, and handed out prizes for a contest on our site. We had to get our 5th anniversary Pathtags finalized, as well as a free back anyone can use for their own Pathtags. We endured an almost month long Denial of Service attack. Yes, that one really happened, although we never publicized it. We could go on, but won’t.

Only the lonely (Know the way I feel) was a smash hit for Roy Orbison in 1960, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard charts. If you’re a little younger than that, a totally different song titled Only the lonely by The Motels peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard chart in 1982. What does this have to do with us, or our challenge caches? Well, on Wednesday, October 21st, 2015, we released 10 more challenge caches (the letter N in The Gulf of Mexico), and they all pertain to lonely caches! Only the lonely, get it? Find caches that haven’t been found on our site in over 1 year, over 2 years, or over 3 years to be eligible to log some of these challenge caches. The 10 caches are listed below, along with a short explanation of the requirements for each. This blog post is a couple days behind, so most have been logged by some of our more observant players who have noticed these new listings. And a heads up, we plan on releasing 12 more challenge caches in the near future. We’re certainly not planning another 5 1/2 month gap between them!

OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 1 – OU0853 (Find a cache that has not been for at least one full year.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 2 – OU0854 (Find a cache that has not been found for at least 2 years.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 3 – OU0855 (Find a cache that has not been found for at least 3 years.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 1.3 – OU0856 (Find 3 caches that have not been for at least one full year.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 1.5 – OU0926 (Find 3 caches that have not been for at least one full year.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 2.3 – OU0928 (Find 3 caches that have not been for at least 2 years.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 2.5 – OU0927 (Find 5 caches that have not been for at least 2 years.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 3.3 – OU0929 (Find 3 caches that have not been for at least 3 years.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 3.5 – OU092A (Find 5 caches that have not been for at least 3 years.)
OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Combination – OU092B (Find 3 caches that have not been found in 1 year, 2 caches that have not been found in 2 years, and 1 cache that has not been found in 3 years.)

Forging Community in Rome

October 15, 2015 OpenCaching North America Leave a comment

Forging Community in Rome is a Geocaching event listed on our site coming up on Friday, October 16th in Rome, Georgia. This is a pre-event (unofficial) for the annual Going Caching Mega Event, now in it’s 5th year, and it’s 2nd consecutive at Ridge Ferry Park in Rome. This interactive Mega has a Renaissance theme this year. You’ll notice from the Forging Community pathtag artwork here you see both Munzee and Geocaching logo’s. This is in fact a tri-listed event for Geocaching (our site), Munzee and Eventzee, which is a less than a year old photo scavenger hunt app brought to you by The team at Munzee.com. If you’re not familiar with Eventzee, you can read more about it here. So at this event, you can expect to find temporary OCNA caches, event (temporary) Munzees with a badge for the event, and an Eventzee scavenger hunt. Another integral part of this is tri-event is a food and donation drive for the Action Ministries Rome that is the local food bank for the Rome Georgia area. For every 5 food items or $5 donated you will receive one of the Forging Community pathtags. The goal is to give back to the community that is hosting their fun that weekend. We sent a few questions to obxgeek, AKA Rob, who hails from Northern Virginia, about this tri-event.

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GeoGearHeads 197: Caching Solo II

October 12, 2015October 14, 2015 OpenCaching North America Leave a comment

OCNA Admin DudleyGrunt and his good friend NativTXN (Denise) were recently on the GeoGearHeads Podcast episode 197, talking Solo Caching. A libsyn embed of the show is at the bottom of this post. This show is not about OCNA, but we like to promote DG, whom we believe to be the most prolific guest in Geocaching Podcasting history. You’ll notice we did not refer to NativTXN as an OCNA Admin. This is because she got way too busy in life, and stepped down from her position with us in mid August 2015. Our records (a post in our forums) indicate she was announced as a member of the OCNA Team on May 1st 2012. We thank her for her 3+ years of service!

GeoGearHeads is a near weekly feature with The Bad Cop and DarrylW4 discussing topics of interest to Geocachers, Location-based Gamers, and Technology Enthusiasts. They record the shows live through Google+ Hangout On Air Thursday nights at 9:10PM Eastern/6:10PM Pacific (The upcoming shows are listed on the Google+ GeoGearHeads page). You can subscribe to the audio version through iTunes, RSS, or Stitcher, watch the shows on YouTube, and check them out on FaceBook, Google+, and Twitter.