While it’s nice to find geocaches, part of the appeal of this sport is the people you meet along the way…

Through attending events and chance encounters on the trails we’ve made numerous close friendships and have put faces to many of the names that we regularly see online.  The local community is filled with fun, adventurous and  generous folk.  However, there’s still so many local geocachers that we’ve never met, especially those outside the Avalon and Central Newfoundland.  We suspect that our readers share these same feelings.  In an effort to rectify that, we wanted to try to profile some local geocachers in a new feature on our blog.

Introducing Treasure Island Caching’s Who’s Who… A  feature where we ask a local geocacher a set of semi-structured questions in an effort to get to know them a little better. The plan is to publish a new profile each month, doing our best to profile geocachers from all regions of the province.

Sounds interesting right? We’re glad you think so! To get things started, we’ll go first…

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What is your geocaching name? Gilligan and Maryjane

How did you decide on your geocaching.com name? Haha! We wanted to find a famous couple from popular culture, two people who showed some sense of adventure… Then we thought about the show Gilligan’s Island.  We had our name… we decided we would be Gilligan and Maryjane! We signed up on geocaching.com and were on our way, the only probably being that the female character’s name is actually Mary Ann… Just how we made this mistake we don’t know, but it’s ours now!

Oh, and in case you’re wondering our name choice has absolutely nothing to do with any other activities we partake in! Believe it or not, we’ve been asked that more than once!

Where do you live? We currently live in St. John’s, but we’re both originally from Central Newfoundland.

When did you start geocaching? August 2006. My brother bought a GPS that summer and we became hooked.

What was your first geocache? It was either Inukshuk Lookout (GCP0C0) or Nature’s Treat (GCB67C)…

How many geocaches have you found to date? As of January 28, 2013 we have 2,332 found geocaches under our belt (and a whole pile of dnfs that we try to forget about)!

What is your favorite geocache type and why? We’re big fans of traditional caching.  Get coordinates, drive/hike, admire the area, find the cache, move on. Bonus points if the container or hide is creative in some way. The other types (e.g. mystery, multi, events, etc.) are fun too but I guess we’re just purists at heart!

What is your favorite geocache that you have hidden? Once upon a time, we had a geocache called The Magical Geo Mystery Tour (GC1D2FV).  It was relatively short-lived, lasting just over a year and only amounted to 17 total finders.  But we’re fairly confident that all of them still remember that particular cache.  It was a cryptic, puzzle themed multi-cache with a few interesting twists. It was a lot of work to put together, but so worth it! Why did it not survive? One piece of the puzzle went missing and we had no way of replacing it, so the entire cache was lost forever.

Our favorite “active” cache is a toss upon between our NL Who’s Who Puzzle Series where you have to find information about famous people from Newfoundland and Labrador and another puzzle cache called Friends of the Forest (GC15D94) which combines two of our favorite pass times, Scrabble and Geocaching.

Who usually goes with you when you’re geocaching? We spend a lot of time hiking/geocaching/laughing with our friends Pip ‘n’ Tif.

What is your most memorable geocaching find? Our most memorable find would be… I believe I have to go with that day Kayla found a ring in a geocache… We got engaged in the fall of 2010 at a geocache called Waterfalls on the Road (GC1H5K2).  It’ll likely be a while before we can beat that one!

What are some of your other hobbies? Kayla is an avid knitter, slowly learning the tricks of the trade.  Allan started playing Ultimate Frisbee this summer and spends one night a week chasing around flying discs! Our remaining spare time is spent reading, playing board games, writing for the blog, watching television, and spending time with family and friends.

Please describe geocaching in one word: Adventure! 

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Well we hope you enjoyed this month’s Treasure Island Caching Who’s Who. Stay tuned next month for a new profile. If you’d like to volunteer to be featured in this section of the blog, you can send us an email or leave us a comment below. Otherwise, we’re coming for you!