Plotting the Past- the Story of my Stats

Readers of my occasional blog posts (is there anyone out there?) will know that I do like to look at my stats! Many cachers spend their time plotting, planning and preparing for challenges, filling grids and completing calendars, as do I. But I also like reflecting on my geocaching achievments and peering back through time at what I’ve done, and how, and why.

Something that catches my eye from time to time is the graph of my finds over time. The example below taken from my Project-GC Profile Stats includes overlaid lines showing both my accumulative total over the 18 years I’ve been caching, and a separate plot for each individual year. My eye is always drawn to the bumps and notches in the lines; the sudden drops, the sharp rises, the blips and the blemishes. Each one tells a tale, an incident either from my life or that of society in general. Here’s few things that I’ve spotted and which I’ve marked on the graph below:

A. This is where it all started. At the beginning of 2006, which also marked the start of a new career for me, I first heard of geocaching, following a chance conversation on a train. The line on the graph at this point is hard to spot at this scale, partly because I only found a handful that year, partly because there were so few around anyway, but also because I just saw it as something else to do while I was out walking, rather than the obession that it would one day become!

B. As my new career with the Diocese of Lincoln developed, I found myself visiting more and more churches across the vast county of Lincolnshire. Sometimes this was during the day but my work often included long evening treks across the fens or weekend excursions up into the wolds. Either way, these visits provided me with endless opportunities to pick up a couple of caches before heading home. This was also a period of expansion in the newly-developed Church Micro series, now a phenomenon in its own right. Having found the few geocahes in my home area, I was now able to cover more ground and so my numbers gradually began to rise, as does the line on the graph! However, in those days 200 finds in a year still seemed like a pretty good haul!

C. In 2013 a number of things happened to me, not all pleasant, but all had an impact on my geocaching. The end of my marriage, illness and redundancy all meant that, for better or worse, I had more time on my hands. While desperately wishing that things were not so, I found myself caching more often, getting more deeply involved in the local caching community and even attending my first Mega event. The graph continued to climb sharply but that all changed in the November, however, where a small nick in the graph marks the month I spent volunteering with The Book Bus in Malawi, where there were then only 10 caches in the country. I found an EarthCache that month but that was it. A further three months working for that charity in the spring of 2014 led to a couple more finds, but otherwise there is a marked step whiuch bears witness to those wonderful times, otherwise bereft of cache finds. This was the first year when I had not found more caches than in the previous one.

D. I returned to the UK in June 2014 and found myself in a new job and a new relationship with someone who also had an obsessive hobby and encouraged me in mine. More camping (and now carvanning!) trips. However, my job was just a fixed-term contact and in the spring of 2015, with my maternity cover role at an end, I took the opportunity to work for a month in Baoding, China, for an educational organisation, teaching, mentoring other teachers and promoting our project. There were no geocaches in Baoding. Other than one day trip to Beijing which reaped three or four finds, this was a lean month once more and the time difference, not to mention social media restriuctions, meant that I was also largely out of touch with my geo-buddies back home. You can clearly see this represented on my stats graph once again, but upon my return I made up for it, with 2015 becoming the first year in which I’d found more than 1,000 caches! When I returned to Baoding the following year I felt more confident in travelling alone to Beijing and other cities, organised a couple of school trips to areas which just happened to have geocaches, and a had a cache-rich short break in Hong Kong and Macau; 2016 shows a much smoother profile!

E. A quick look at my chart in 2019 might make you think that I was going off caching a bit, and the cumulative total certainly shows a blunter angle at this point. The truth is that there are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly my father was now quite ill and sadly passed away later that year; my focus was much more on supporting my mum and being with my family. From a caching point of view, however, I was much more focussed on finding particular caches now rather than just going for the numbers. Virtuals were still relatively rare and I wanted to see if I could find them all. Challenge caches, filling the DT grid, completing my calendar, colouring in the counties map; these all became the objects of my caching desire. I was also getting more and more interested in learning how to solve puzzles. The actual solving took time and they rarely formed part of a series, so much caching was largely individual caches, and sometimes remote locations.

F. A couple of significant things happened in 2020, one of which we’re all familiar with. Firstly the Covid-19 pandemic meant that two periods of that year, most significantly the spring, were spend in ‘lockdown’ when we were not allowed to leave our homes, travel far or mix with others. Everyone’s graph will surely mark this global event, and we all breathed a sigh of relief as restrictions were lifted and we could venture out once more. But secondly, my friend Kelly returned home from years living and working in Zambia. She loved walking and I’d introuduced her to geocaching on her occasional trips home. We’d also cached together when I’d visited her in Africa. Lockdown was certainly not the return home that Kelly had hoped for, but once we were allowed out again, we really went for it and, despite those two periods of restrictions, 2020 became easily my best year to date! Big weekend walks became regular, and after work trips in the summer became more common too, particularly while Kelly was furloughed. While the world burned, our stats skyrocketted!

G. And so it continued- weekends away, big adventures and sneaking in short walks whenever possible all helped to maintain the hights of that remarkable year. Something else was happening too, something which will skew our stats forever and totally change the playing field- the rise of the Adventure Lab! More and more sets of Ad Labs were being awarded, and most of our days out now included at least one set, often in the same place as the caches we were there to find and with multiple sets often overlapping and using the same locations. All good fun, and certainly helful to our totals, but nothing like as enjoyable. Counting bolts on a gate or looking for a random word on a plaque would never replace the thrill of finding a well-hidden nano or solving a cunning field puzzle. But if we were already there, we’d log them and so our numbers rose at a much greater rate. And now, with Ad Lab sets being distributed to almost anyone who wants them, we have the development of Labcache Pools and the opportunity to find several hundred in a day at the same location. Again, not the most exciting way to play the game, but I’m sure we’ll do it and it’ll give us something to do one rainy day in a car park near Nottingham!

A F Wright
21/11/2024