Beach caching

Today, the Tadpole and I traveled down to San Diego. There was a Vexilla flag down there worth 8 points to me, plus a dashpoint, so we put the two together along with some geocaching and made a day of it. We found the dashpoint, then headed for the flag. The flag was on Fiesta Island, a man made island in Mission Bay, which is where Sea World is located. In fact, when we pulled off the freeway, we exited on Sea World Drive, but went the opposite direction from Sea World.

The flag find was an easy find as were the caches today, but the island was a neat little adventure. Each cache was hidden in a similar fashion usually under a bush, however there were a couple of variations. We even had one cache that was guarded by an attack lizard. Not really, but I spotted this lizard on a branch and as I was watching the lizard, I also spotted the cache about a half an inch away from the lizard. Unfortunately, I got to close to the lizard with my camera before taking the picture so there was a thousand words that got away.

Fiesta Island and nearby Dog Island are all connected, so I'm at a loss as to why one island is named differently depending upon which side of the island you're on, but I have a speculation. At one point while walking over to find our second cache of the day, I looked at the screen and the mapping software in my Garmin had us in the water. Not just near a shoreline, but totally in the water for at least 800 feet in all directions. Now, when I looked around, all I saw was land, but my GPSr was saying there should be water there, which leads me to believe that the part we were walking on was water at one time in the not so distant past and it has been filled in, thus rendering two islands into one.

When I started looking at this island yesterday in preparation for the today, I noticed a series of caches that had been temporarily disabled. Apparently, there is a big softball tournament on this island in July and the attendees get kind of rowdy. The cache owner of this set of caches temporarily disables his caches, and does maintenance on them during the month of July, then puts them back out again in August. Which means that we could come down here again in the fall perhaps and there will be a bunch more caches for us to find. That's always a plus, especially when you don't end up finding a couple in a given area.

The day was pretty much picture perfect. The Tadpole got to enjoy a secluded beach and toss a couple of stone in the water. The sail boats were out in force. We saw a couple of them tip over probably due to inexperience. These particular sail boats were on the small size from the looks of them, probably designed to teach sailors the ropes so to speak. Even the gulls seemed to be enjoying the day. The caches on the island varied in size from ammo can to small Tupperware type of containers. Overall, it was just a plain good day to be outside, enjoying the beach atmosphere and caching.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:
KITEBOARDING - by Splashman & Splashette
DRAGON'S FIESTA! - by DRAGONJD
GB #3 tanner_scout - by lulu499 and LegoCollin