As the dust settles on GVI’s latest Mega, we have a slight change to our GVI Committee. Rod Lyon aka n0w0rries has decided the time has come for the baton to be passed on so that he can spend more time focusing on his wellbeing and with his family. We wish Rod all the best and thank him for his tireless efforts on the committee over the passed 18 months. Rod now passes the baton onto the the newest member of our team.
We are very excited to announce that Peter McClive aka Mister Doctor will be joining the team. Many of you would have had the chance to connect and meet with Mister Doctor over last weekends Mega, but others of you may not have had the opportunity and so heymissjo thought she would ask him some questions, so that we could get to know him a little more.
Thanks for chatting with me Pete, can you share with us when you started geocaching and how you decided on your caching name.
I’m a secondary science teacher with a PhD, and my students usually call me Dr McClive. Except, that is, for my sweet Year 7s, who start off calling me Mr McClive, get a little tongue-tied, and end up saying Mr Dr McClive. That sounded to me like a geocaching name, and so Mister Doctor was born. Once I had a name, I borrowed a school GPS one Christmas holidays in 2010 and found some local caches, but then found no more for 7 years. It was only when Optus finally shut down its 2G network in 2017 that I upgraded to a smart phone, and the Geocaching app was one of the first apps I installed. From then on, I was hooked!
How do you like to play the game? Are you a numbers person, do you chase challenges, do you love the adventure or have have your own approach to caching?
I think that discovering the local knowledge of an area is what keeps me coming back to geocaching. Each cache has a personal story attached to it and even a CO you can chat to, which for me makes this game so much richer than something like a Pokémon hunt, or the collection of munzees. So, I tend to target caches that tell a story and make a memorable impact. I’m not really about the numbers, although I do try to ramp them up just so I can earn favourite points to give away!
What is the craziest thing you have done in the name of caching?
I tend to be fairly risk-averse, so there are no crazy stories of having-to-get-that-cache for me. Having said that, I really do enjoy building caches, so I do have a crazy obsession with Op shops, hard waste collections and places like Resource Rescue! The caching corner of my garage looks like a cross between a kindergarten and a junk yard. Now, that I think of it, I do have a memory of building a large cache out of found objects, sitting astride a surf mat with the cache in my lap, and very cautiously paddling out to an island in the middle of the night to set it up. That was pretty crazy!
What is currently on your Geocaching Bucket-List?
I recently completed my first real challenge of filling my found dates calendar grid. This first started when I achieved a 7-day streak for Streak Week, but in doing so realised that maintaining such a streak could be grounds for divorce. Filling a calendar was much more family-friendly as I was ultimately able to spread the challenge over a number of years. Next on my Bucket-list is filling my D/T and Ausmer grids. At the recent Whittlesea Mega, I also committed to my first challenge cache (WCW Cache Local Mini Challenge), as well as definitely/probably/maybe completing the TWC geoart, so I’m not quite done with Whittlesea yet!
What is the most remote or unusual place you have collected a Geocache?
A few years ago, we took our kids on a holiday to Edinburgh, some 20 years after having lived there pre-kids and pre-geocaching. It was brilliant seeing a city we already knew well through a geocaching lens, and as a result GCH440 The Other Side of Edinburgh is now my most Northerly cache.
Welcome to the team Mister Doctor, we look forward to seeing what magic you can add to our community next year.
– heymissjo