Liquid Gold (Beautiful Albany's Heritage Penny Collection #02) Frenchman Bay, Western Australia, Australia
By Albany Canucks on 25-Oct-10. Waypoint GA2661

Your mission is to find an Australian penny hidden at a natural spring at a beautiful beach in Frenchman's Bay area.

A beautiful beach.  A natural spring.  A piece of history.  And an old Australian penny.  Those are some of the things you can expect to see on this cache hunt!  Like most virtual caches, the main requirement is to get to the location indicated by the coordinates.  The easiest way to get here is to park in the parking lot at Frenchman Bay Picnic area, and take a short walk along one of the best sandy white beaches in Albany.  The coordinates will bring you to Vancouver Spring, a natural spring that Captain George Vancouver wrote about in 1791, when visiting with his ships Discovery and Chatham.  After anchoring in a rainy and dark evening, the dawn of the following morning (Michaelmas Day, September 29) greeted them with the beautiful vista of a safe anchorage.  Vancouver was joined by his sailing master Joseph Whidbey and the surgeon and naturalist Archibald Menzies, and they rowed towards one of the sandy beaches.  According to Vancouver's historical record: "A stream of fresh water drained there through the beach, which although nearly the colour of brandy, was exceedingly well tasted; by this stream was a clump of trees sufficient to answer our present want of fuel." Vancouver was able to use the natural spring to water his sailors and his ships - this was the equivalent of liquid gold!  Today you can taste and see the same stream of fresh water that Vancouver enjoyed, because the spring is still producing water today.  Sip some water, and perhaps take a dip in the ocean or enjoy a BBQ while you're here - it's a beautiful spot!  There are also several regular caches in the area, so you can kill several geocaching birds with one stone if you wish.

But this is a virtual cache with one small difference: we have hidden an old Australian penny right on the very spot where we recorded the coordinates.  The original requirement to take a photo of a view from around GZ is now optional, but to prove that you were really there, after you've logged the find please send us a private message telling us the year on the penny.  You should be able to find the penny without too much difficulty when you pinpoint GZ, but please do NOT try to remove it. An old penny won't make you rich, so leave it here for others to enjoy the somewhat unusual challenge offered by this virtual cache.  The penny is not buried and doesn't require the removal of rocks or anything else, but is in plain view - you just need to look in the right spot!  Is the penny hunt like looking for a needle in a hay stack?  Not when you have a GPS receiver and the exact coordinates where it's located!  

This is the second of what the Canucks hope will become a Heritage Penny Collection sprinkled throughout Beautiful Albany, in some of the wonderful places that this area has to offer.  Our aim is to bring you to a nice place where you can enjoy the beauty of the natural environment, and the additional challenge of finding the equivalent of a needle in a haystack - made easy with today's technology.  The more accessible the location, the harder we'll try to make the penny hunt.   The real "wealth" that this land abounds in isn't measured in pennies, but in nature's gifts of beauty rich and rare, and we hope our penny trail will help you get there to appreciate it all.  Enjoy Beautiful Albany, enjoy our Heritage, and enjoy the hunt!

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