WHAT IT ALL MEANS
Thieves are casual, move quick and leave fast. Looters have more time on their hands, but seldom any technology to help them search. Raiders have lots of tech and lots of time on their hands. So what does this all mean in real terms? The only barrier to finding a cached item is time. Therefore, we can now establish a rule:
Think about how profound that statement is for a moment. Anything you hide. Certainly, this does not apply to outdoor caching. For example, given enough time, one could not search, say, the State of Nebraska. It’s just not humanly possible. You get the idea – the smaller the space, the more within the realm of probability that your cached item will be found.
How this relates to your home is pretty much the same idea. If you had a 2500 square foot home and wanted to hide a 50 gallon water barrel, there would only be so many places you could hide it. In fact, in the average home, it wouldn’t take much time at all to find such a large object. But how about if you wanted to hide a single one ounce Krugerrand gold coin?
A Krugerrand, for example, weighs 33.9 grams, and is a little over an inch and a quarter around. It’s just .11” thick, and at current prices, is worth about $1350. Now imagine hiding this coin in a 2500 square foot house – suddenly, finding this coin (even with modern technology) is going to be exactly like searching the entire state of Nebraska. It simply cannot be done (at least easily), even if ample time is allotted. This leads us to our second rule of caching:
There are plenty of small things you possess that are ideal for caching. Here are some examples:
- Firearms components (rails, slides, magazines, etc.)
- Ammunition
- Gold and silver coins
- Jewelry and loose gemstones
- Keys to lock boxes
- Memory sticks, thumb drives, and other electronic storage media
- Cash
You will note that the above list of items is normally stored within a safe of some sort – exactly where you would expect to look for them. There is no reason, however, to store such items there. We do recommend that you store at least some valuables within your safe if you happen to have a safe. The reason for this is simple – if your safe is broken into or opened by police, they will at least find something to tide them over. Then, you can claim that the items within the safe were “all you had” and hope that the thieves move on. This, of course, leads us to the next rule of caching:
