2025-03-21 -26 153

Location

On a beach on Sunshine Coast, directly east of Mirrool St

Participants

Alice
Alice’s partner

Expedition

Expedition report written by Patrick: I was sitting at home on a grey Melbourne post-summer day. The hash was close by and I considered attendance, but I had to work all day, and I had plans for this evening, and we had already dispatched Stevage to deal with the Melbourne East hash. All-in-all too hard.

However... browsing the world, I noticed that there was a nice Queensland hash point on a beach/shallow water (tides permitting of course) in the Sunshine Coast. Conveniently, my co-worker Alice also lives in the area. Even more conveniently, I needed to call her to discuss a work problem. We spent about an hour dealing with the work problem, which we eventually solved using the moral equivalent of “turn it off and turn it back on again”.

Of course, team camaraderie is important, so I stayed on the call for a few more minutes to chew the fat.

“Say Alice,” I said, “you’re up in Sunshine at the moment. The weather must be real nice up there”.

“Oh yes,” she replied, “beautiful sunny day, top of 29°”.

“Sounds like beach weather”, I mused idly. “You know... you could go for a paddle. I could even send you a Google Maps link you could go to, which looks like a nice patch of beach, and you could take a photo of yourself there. Hell, you could even take a screenshot of Google Maps showing you were within the GPS error radius of the p—”

Suddenly, thunder cracked, the videochat connection went fuzzy, and the mood of the conversation became palpably darker. Alice eyed me warily.

“This is the ‘geohashing’ you were talking about. You’re trying to trick me into geohashing under false pretences. Well, let it be known your outlandish tricks will not work on me! Good day!”

... actually that’s a total lie, Alice is much kinder than that, and also I do not trick people into geohashing; I spruik it at every opportunity. I sent Alice the map and the instructions; and she said she’d think about it.

As the work day wore on I checked in occasionally, and did my own work as the rain beat down and the day got greyer and greyer. Just after 5pm I decided it was time to take the laptop to the pub and went for beers, as one does, sipping my way through a few pints.

At 7pm (6pm Queensland time) I got the exciting message reporting geohash success, with a photo of Alice, her partner, and a beautiful blue Queensland sky. They had timed the tides so that the hash itself was just in the shallow water. I sent messages of congratulations, rued the much worse weather where I was, and half-heartedly attempted to explain to the bartender why I found the message exciting.

The shallow water, I understand, makes it a rare hash that qualifies for none of the “basic location” achievements: clearly it was not in the air, underwater or undergound; it was not on land (see photo); was not watery enough to qualify as a water geohash, but clearly the feet are totally submerged. However, I believe it is the first success in the Maroochydore graticule, so that’ll have to be a consolation prize.