PinPoint Pursuit Trackable Race

PinPoint Pursuit Final Update, August 2025 – Chevalier wins the race!

After ten months of worldwide travels, we have a winner! At the UK Severn Mega last weekend we were delighted to announce that PP Racer : Chevalier, owned by Paul and Sue Le Chevalier aka Hougoumont, had beaten the opposition and become the winners of our first ever trackable race! Their tag even made it to the Mega itself, and here it is pictured with its proud owners. Paul and Sue won a PinPoint goody bag which included a year’s subscription to PinPoint, a 25th Anniversary geocoin and other bits and bobs.

Chevalier travelled a whopping 75,955 miles since its release (not including a virtual trip to the so-called ‘Locationless’ Cache at HQ in Seattle), almost 30,000 miles further than the runner up ‘Pat the draenog’. Altogether, the trackables in our race travelled an incredible 445,410 miles, equivalent to almost 18 times around the Earth! The ‘wooden spoon’, however, goes to Tachycardia which journeyed a mere 196 feet across Flitwich, from its initial location to an Event around the corner, where it sadly remains logged.

Along the way, our PinPoint Pursuit tags visited 36 separate countries, including such exotic locations as Singapore, New Zealand, Paraguay, Martinique, Mauritius and Lithuania! We suspect that two race tags went missing along the way, although you never know if they might turn up again one day. However, that represents just 5% of the tags in the race, which isn’t a bad success rate!

Managing the race wasn’t without its own challenges. Since the demise of the former TB Race website, all calculations have had to be performed manually, taking the distance from the trackable’s own page, where it can be found just above all the logs. Despite careful efforts, a couple of manual errors were made (and subsequently corrected!). If anyone out there thinks they have the skills to develop an automated website to manage these races, they should make themselves known!

Soon after the race began, it became clear that we needed to introduce a ‘rule’ to encourage owners to drop their trackable into a cache and leave it there for others to pick up, rather than travel with it themselves. Another issue that was soon spotted was that some tags had ‘visited’ the new ‘Where’s 25?’ Locationless cache. It turns out that even a Locationless cache has a location, in this case Geocaching HQ in Seattle! Several trackables made a virtual journey to Washington state and back, even though they completed the requirements of the cache thousands of miles away! Again, manual adjustments were made to the leaderboard each month to remove any distances accrued on these ephemeral journeys. It’s a good job we like playing with spreadsheets!

We thoroughly enjoyed holding our first trackable race, and we are indebted to NE Geocaching supplies for creating the tags themselves. While it’s clearly too late to enter the race, they are still available to purchase from them just for fun and to help spread the word about PinPoint all around the globe! Thanks also to them and to Scorch Wood crafts for their contributions to the winners’ goody bag. But finally a massive thanks to everyone who took part and especially to our winners, Hougoumont and their intrepid travelling tag Chevalier!

Happy Caching!

~ Andy & Jane