A faulty Garmin Colorado and some cache maintenance

The weekend before last, we'd cached in the pouring rain all day in South Birmingham. When we're out caching I use a Garmin Oregon 400T and Isaac has a Garmin Colorado 300.

During the day in the rain, Isaac's Colorado kept switching into Mass Storage Mode, as if it thought a USB cable was being plugged into it. I suspected rain had got into the USB socket (despite the unit being advertised as waterproof) and sure enough, after we left it drying out in the Jeep for an hour or so, it was working as intended again.

This week, Isaac had the Colorado on a lanyard round his neck on the way to caching and by the time we got there, there were quite a few visible droplets of water and general fogginess under the screen on the unit. Hmmm - the water must have worked it's way internally as well last week.

We relied on my Oregon for most of the day as the fog on Isaac's screen was making it hard to read.

Anyway, this morning I phoned Garmin Support, who were as puzzled as us as to why the water had got into the unit, but gave me a returns number and told me to send it in and they would send a new unit out to us. I tried to see if they would send us the equivalent Oregon unit (as we much prefer the ease of use and lightness of the Oregon over the Colorado) but they insisted it was like for like. At least it solved the problem though :-).

Just as I was about to pop out to post it to them, a DNF popped into my inbox for one of our caches that we adopted off MarcB in Gnosall. It was the 3rd consecutive DNF on the cache so I went out armed with a replacement cache just in case.

First stop was the Post Office in Gnosall. With the Colorado on it's way, I went over to check on the cache. Sure enough, it had gone as the pile of sticks it was under was still there, but no cache was anywhere to be seen.

I scouted around and found a much safer hiding place not far away so hid the new caches, took some revised co-ords and headed off home to update the cache page.