NOPE*NOPE*HELLNOPE*

There's this one geocache not too far from me that I haven't found yet.  It sticks out on my map like the proverbial sore thumb...one green dot in a sea of smiley faces.  Of course, there's a good reason it's still unfound.  It's on a tiny island in the middle of a smallish river, sitting on top of the stone support pillar for a long-gone bridge maybe 20 feet up.  People usually do this one with a boat and climbing gear, neither of which I possess.

I haven't had an adventure for a while, so two of my friends and I decided to do some recon on this one yesterday.  We packed up an extension ladder and our waders and decided to see if we could wade across to the island with the ladder!  Sad to say, I've done much weirder things than that while geocaching. Anyway, we get ourselves and the ladder and waders to the shoreline after a nasty bushwhack, then wade in to see how deep the water is.

On our side of the river, it gets deep pretty quickly, so we realize that wading across there isn't going to work.  Two of us have chest waders like the kind fishermen use, while the third only has hip waders, so he stays on shore while the other guy and I wade upstream to a shallower area, cross and wade back down the other side of the river to case that side.  It's slow and mucky going, lots of silt and roots and slippery rocks on the bottom, but we make it back to the island without incident and start checking out the water level on the other side.  Unfortunately, we decide that it's probably too deep on that side as well, at least at current water levels.  Given that the mosquitoes are fierce anyway, we decide to come back and check it out again in winter.

As we turn to retrace our steps to the other side, the guy wading with me looks up and sees what he thinks is a head swimming toward us in the river at a distance.  Then another.  When he notices the second, he calls my attention to them.  Could have been debris, but he didn't think so and neither did I.  Odds are it was either swimming snakes (nonvenomous) or turtles, probably snakes.  That was the final straw!!  We got the hell out of Dodge at a good clip after that.

We'll be back another time, but not in summer!  We got our adventure, anyway, even if we didn't get the cache.  THIS time.  :)