The Maiden Voyage

I've had my blow up boat for about four years now. It was intended for the pond in Pullman but that plan sadly fell through. I got into geocaching in July and when I became a member in January I saw that there was a cache, Fisherman's Cache, on the Lake Lawrence Island. You had to take a boat ride to get there to retrieve the cache. I had to do it. We started planning for it last weekend. If it didn't rain today we were going to go for it. He drove down and we met at Mackey's on the corner. We took both cars out to the public boat launch off of Pleasant Beach Drive. We parked out of the way of the trucks and boat trailers. I got the boat out and unfolded it. Derek grabbed it and hooked it up to his car. His car has an outlet in it. I've never seen a car with one of those before. He got it blown up really quickly. While he was doing that, I put together the oars and decided what we wanted to bring and put in the back pack.



We got everything situated and headed down to the lake. There were several rednecks in their aluminum boats with a 12 pack of Coors. We got the boat in the water and decided that sitting on our knees while we rowed would work the best. It was a nice peaceful float out to the island. Derek noticed a bald eagle in one of the trees. Once we got there, we found a place to dock, tied the boat up, legs fell asleep and went and looked for the cache. The cache was easy to find. We brought it up to the clearing and looked through the tackle box. Lots of fishing stuff. I left some trinkets behind and Derek left one of his coins in there.







We walked around the island for a bit to see what was around. Lots of beer cans, some garbage, an actual garbage can was on the island, someone had burned a chair and a mattress, there were tons of rocks, a few fire pits and lots of beaver chew marks on the trees and brush.



We headed out, got back in the same way we got out. Halfway through our trip back, it started sprinkling. You could barely see the ripple marks from the rain on the lake. We got closer to shore and decided to get out of the boat before the boat launch, there were lots of people in the way. We took the boat to the car, deflated it, cleaned it up a little and folded it back up. I had a ball bag so we just put the boat in there with the oars.

We went and tried to find Knitting Girl out past Clearwood. We were there for a good half hour before calling it quits. We looked every where and came up with a DNF.

I took him to several other caches I found in the Vail area earlier in my geocaching career.

As of today I have 280 caches.