2015-07-02 45 -73

An expedition by Reddit user tavernierdk that they reported on the subreddit as quoted following:

TLDR: Had a great time on my first go, looking for some rules to make it even more fun. Will post pictures if there is an interest!

I've loved the idea of Geohashing for a while, and just went on my first adventure today (07-02-15). It was AMAZING! I'm in Montreal (45,-73) and today's coordinate was in the water, about 1 km from the nearest piece of land. We decided to go for it, and to make it an all day adventure, decided that using our phone or the internet would be prohibited until we were close enough on the water to hone in on the exact location.

We showed up in the general area, and started driving along the coast to find possible location to rent a boat of some sort. After talking to some people at the local marina, we ended up back in the more urban area, found a community center, and got directions to a place that could rent kayaks, canoes and such (no GPS allowed). The place was literally 2 km from the node! We rented a Canoe for the three of us, and got on our way.

We got some pretty rough waves on the way there, to the point where we really had to question turning back. We decided to press on, but the further out we got, the rougher it got, the harder it was to keep the canoe straight, and as I was the one with the phone (that I was trying to keep dry) it was tricky staying perpendicular to the waves and getting a screen shot of where we were at the same time. We got one that I thought was close enough, and with great effort we turned back and got back to the rental place.

Before we got there, the guy in charge of renting came to meet us in his small zodiac, because they were worried about us, and tried calling us. Unfortunately the cell phone number they had for us wasn't the one we had in the canoe, and he came to check on us. At that point we were on the way back, and in much calmer waters, so we told him we'd meet him back at the rental place. Upon arrival we celebrated a bit, and then check the screencap to see exactly how close we got. It wasn't as good as we expected. We were about to turn back when it struck us. We had explained the concept to the guy at the rental place, and he seemed pretty into it. So we asked him for a ride. On the zodiac. For some reason that still eludes me, he actually accepted.

We all boarded the (now) four of us, and starting making our way back. The waves that were rocking us on the slow-moving canoe were now splashing the living daylights out of us on the faster moving zodiac and it was a struggle trying to keep our only phone dry. (I was clutching it in a gap between my chest and my life jacket, which seemed like the driest area on the boat. We managed to get much closer to the node before the driver of the zodiac couldn't be persuaded to go further. We made our way back, completely thrilled with the day's adventures. We may have missed the mark by a little, but now I'm just eager to repeat the experience again.

It struck us that we were very lucky in the combination of factors that lent to the amazing kind of adventure that we had, and are now looking for arbitrary rules to make it equally interesting every time. One of the idea is that we can't get closer than 5k from the node by car, and another is that if we use a car, it has to be through hitchhiking. I'm looking for any further ideas that could be made into a set of rules to make sure each excursion has a great story to it.