Geocaching Puzzle #2 (and maybe a contest)

David F David F
In the heat of making puzzles for geocaches, I decided to see if  the Rochester and Syracuse caching communities wanted to engage in a little bit of friendly competition to see who would be able to crack one quicker.  So I hid two nice ammo-box caches and then published two listings at the same time.  The clue portion of the Rochester listing is here:
55159 71597 37723 31597 25849 87377 2335514455 23315 97551 59715 97377 23315 9725849873 77233 55144 55233 15975 51597 1597377233 15972 58498 73772 33551 44552 3315975515 97159 73772 33159 72584 98737 7233551445 52331 59755 15971 59737 72331 5972584987 37723 35514 45523 31597

As before the hints are given in ROT-13 so you don't have to see them if you don't want to. First hint: Yrbaneqb Qn Cvfn. Second hint: Svsgl-svir vf anhtug.

Believe it or not, I just noticed this: in second hint, the last word, in ROT-13, is its own anagram.  Imagine that.

Then a funny thing happened when I published these two caches.  Or rather, did not happen.  While the Rochester cachers jumped right on it and started working mightily to solve the Rochester puzzle and get the First-to-Find bragging rights, the Syracuse cachers did pretty much... nothing.  As far as I can tell, no serious attempts were made by anyone out that way to solve the puzzle.  It was just not that interesting.  The Rochester cache was found and logged about 24 hours after publication.  Five weeks after publishing the Syracuse version, I canceled it because it had never once been logged, and converted it to a simple multi-point cache.  Which was then logged as Found within 24 hours. I guess Rochester is more into puzzles than Syracuse.

I also think that readers of this blog might be more into puzzles than the average bear, so I am thinking of doing a contest around these puzzles.  I had made a series of eight caches with puzzles to solve, and the eighth was dependent on clues that you could find written inside the lids of the other seven.  "QMXLP" and this one, which I re-titled "Rochester Wins!" were the first two in the series.

So: you solve the puzzles as I publish them here, and submit the correct GPS coordinates (somewhere in Monroe County, NY) on the page linked at the right.  Coordinates are in degrees and minutes to the third decimal place.  The first person to solve each puzzle correctly gets an honorable mention in the next post, and the first person to solve the final one wins a one-year PREMIUM subscription to LastPass!

So get your noodling tools ready and go!  You are already two puzzles behind....

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