Air Cannon Cache

Sometimes it can feel like all the geocaches you find are pretty dull. After a couple numbers runs with my daughter, we were finding mostly guardrail caches, and road sign micros and they are about as exciting as washing the floor. Sure you feel obliged to do it, and may even convince yourself it is necessary, but that doesn't make it less of a chore. On the other end of the spetrum of geocaches are those that offer a unique geocaching experience. The cache we found today, Lock N' Load, is one of those. The COs, Black*dot and Quarter-Master are college kids that have really gotten into geocaching, and creative hides. Their caches are well thought out, well built, and challenging. I haven't yet found all of their caches, but they are consistently among the best in the Oak Ridge area. Lock N' Load is perhaps the king of them all (so far?). It was published earlier in the week and I took my daughter out to give it a try on Thursday. The cache page states that a boat/swimming is required, as well as a bicycle pump. I was thinking that maybe you would pump up a submerged bladder which would float the cache out in the water. Instead, when we showed up we found a good-sized air cannon mounted 10 ft up in a tree. Obviously we would have to pump up the pressure in the air-reservoir until a pressure-switch would trigger a valve to blow the cache out the barrel, and out over the water. Unfortunately my little hand-pump was not up for the challenge. The pressure required to trigger the air cannon (80 psi) and the volume of the reservoir meant it took forever with a tiny pump. I chugged away a it though and finally heard some little noises from the valve, but instead of firing the cache out, it burped the pressure down 5 psi. Disheartened, I abandoned this attempt.

As luck would have it though, a few other local cachers had posted their intentions of checking out the cache over the weekend and after contacting them, I was invited to join them. Since they were bringing the pump, I volunteered to do water retrieval. The whole family came out to watch and we got some fun video.


How awesome is an air cannon cache? How often will you have an opportunity to play with someone's air cannon? It simply has to be experienced. The whole concept was extremely well executed, having the cannon up high in a tree where it is difficult for anyone to mess with it, having the trigger mechanism be automatic and at 80 psi so that the cache is sure to fly over a hundred feet out over the water, a re-load mechanism placed nearby so that cachers can reset the cache for the next finders. Everything about the cache was well planned. This is one of those caches that we'll be revisiting just for the fun of it.