First in a series of Muggle Deception Techniques, we present to you The Camera Ploy. The idea behind muggle deception is to learn tips and techniques to more easily blend-in while you are geocaching. You want to do your best to NOT call attention to yourself in order to protect the location of the geocache and hopefully prevent it from being "muggled" (i.e. removed or destroyed by a non-geocacher).
Before we continue, here's an important caveat. You should NEVER be purposefully deceptive to any police officer, security guard, property owner, or anyone else who has a valid reason to know what you are doing. Please use common sense and respect for authority in these cases. We also don't suggest outright lying, but that is a personal preference. You can make your own judgement call on that one. When we talk about "muggle deception", we are referring to the idea of being unobtrusive geocachers, not irresponsible ones.
OK, so the first technique we'll share is the often used "Camera Ploy". This is very easy to do since many geocachers have cameras with them to take photos, and almost everyone has a smartphone with a camera built in these days. Photo taking is so commonplace, that no one will even give you a second look if they think that all you're doing is posing for a picture.
The technique that we demonstrate is where one person pretends to take photos, and the other person (at ground zero) pretends to pose for the photo while they are actually looking for the geocache. Now, granted, this is a bit hard to do if you are by yourself, but you can still use the camera ploy technique to "waste time" if you need to wait for some muggles to move along before hunting for the geocache.
In our video, Sean has a starring role in demonstrating both the "wrong" way and the "right" way to hunt for a geocache when there are a lot of muggles around. Check it out HERE, and don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel.
I almost always am geocaching on my own, so the Camera Ploy isn’t an option for me most of the time. I do most of my caching in urban areas and parks so there is almost always some trash around as well as muggles. I bring along those plastic grocery bags, so I can always pick up trash while I’m hunting for the cache. Once I’ve located the cache, I can even secret it in the trash bag as I move off to a location to open and sign the log. Then it’s back in the trash bag as I continue to “collect trash” to return it to it’s hiding place. My geocaching becomes unofficial/unpublished CITO events. Can I log those?