From time to time we receive stories from either the owner a trackable that got rescued or somebody who had a special experience while being on a rescue mission.
This one is the new world record*: The Coin was stuck in a cache for 5 years before “B4alltime” got the notification from tb-rescue.com and went to save the Coin. But read the whole story (taken from the original with authors permission):
Found on a tb rescue mission exactly five years + one day after this coin was placed in GCHPEX, which was disabled the following day and never reactivated or found again until today.
We initially dismissed the rescue request because of the low likelihood of finding the coin after 1,827 days of being lost.
To make matters worse the State Park where this cache was placed was closed two years or more ago due to budgetary problems, so we weren’t sure whether we would be trespassing if we looked for it.
But, we love a challenge and this was a good one, so we left home 50 miles away under gray skies, wind and rain. One we arrived, access was not quite as close as we expected due to gating of the road leading to the cache, and it was raining, Nevertheless we bundled up and brought out the umbrellas and our special geocaching tool.
It was a quick hike, easy access to the old geozone but would anything be left of the old cache ? Rox was the first to notice a small, colorful decoration on the ground , below that a moldy wad of paper that might once have been a log. Nearby was a tiny toy car, so we had found the containerless cache but there was no geocoin on the ground.
So out came our special geotool the “Coinmaster 4900D“, our old metal detector. Progressively sweeping the surrounding area we found 1 to 3 inches underground
1)Several wads of aluminum foil.
2)A nail
3)A spike, probably left over from the railroad days.
4)The top of an old can.
and then…
5)China Town Geocoin. Buried in the sandy soil, its paperwork soggy and moldy, but the coin itself looked fine.
Major celebrating ensued.
And now we shall re-prepare the appropriate paperwork and try to get this nice but long-slumbering coin back on its way.
*unfortunately we did not keep the number of days that a TB was stuck in a cache before it was rescued so far. But we have never heard of any longer time than 5 years + 1 day so we will assume this IS THE CURRENT WORLD RECORD.
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