UK Cache Mag review

Before I start, let me make it clear that my views are mine alone, and as a blog entry, this is little more than a subjective review from one member of the intended audience. Your views may be different, and that's great. It just means you'll have to get a copy of UK Cache Mag to find out!

Well I was not expecting to see this brought out, to be totally honest, but I was delighted when I saw a new publication, devoted entirely to geocaching, in the newsletter of ukgeocachers.co.uk. To my knowledge this is the first proper published, tangible, geocaching magazine designed for the British reader. As you may know, I am a loyal fan to FTF Geocacher magazine which was quite possibly the first serious geocaching publication in the world. I don't miss issues of FTF Geocacher and whilst I always love reading it, it's a little too American at times. This isn't a criticism of the magazine; it's meant for an American audience so of course it's going to be American in style and content, but sometimes it's just nice to read something British.

So yes, I found this magazine pretty good, although sadly not exceptional. It relies heavily on cacher-submitted content, which is good. If one person were to write an entire magazine it would probably be a little dull, if not entirely biased towards whatever the publisher wanted to read. I don't care much for the GSAK Q&A section, having never really clicked with GSAK, but I can see that that would be a total delight to many geocachers, perhaps newbies who are just starting to discover their stats and how wide-ranging they are! GSAK is the perfect tool for organising all those stats, but it's a monster of a program to get used to.

So yes, before I lead off on a GSAK tangent... a few of the articles really grabbed my attention, particularly the one about how frustrating it is to go to great lengths to hide a cache only to have "TFTC" as a log. I wholly agree that all we cachers should be trying to think of interesting things to say in our logs, and we cache owners need to make sure that our hides are worthy of such logs! Good food for thought in that article.

Sadly what spoiled it totally for me, and this will probably not bother that many people (I am a little pedantic about this - ask my friends and colleagues!), is the atrocious spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes on almost every single page. For the record, you do not put apostrophes in straight forward plurals. You do not put an apostrophe in "its" unless it's short for "it is" or "it has". Other errors of a similar nature include the unnecessary over-use of hyphenation when words are at the end of a line, and the simple fact that there appears to have been no proof-reading prior to publication. The word "content" without a "c" (?) got in there and on more than one occasion the sentence never actually appeared to have an end, seemingly cut off at the bottom of the page.

These errors are pedantic, I know, but I feel that if you're going to publish something on a grand scale it needs to be thoroughly checked over before it hits the shops. Thankfully errors like this are so very easily corrected that future issues may be damn-near perfect! As for the content, I didn't find it gripping, but there was enough in there to sustain my interest from cover to cover. Seems like all the lengthy wordy articles were left for the back though, which is a shame and a few more photographs in the second half of the magazine wouldn't have gone amiss.

Have you read UK Cache Mag yet? What did you think of it? Post your comments below!