I took advantage of a visit from an old friend to build a home for a letterbox. For months, I've been planning a cache on an OR beach. In about 3 1/2 hours over the course of two evenings, we set the cache and constructed it's disguise as a beach hut. When it was done, we stood back and noticed that when looking at it from the Jetty, it looked like "Medusa".
Day one was a dark, dreary, rainy, windy, typical OR coast day. Day two was perfect for many of the photos posted on this blog.
I had previously picked out a site where there was a lone piece of driftwood, deeply and securely embedded into the sand, protruding into the air about 8 feet. This would serve as the primary beam, as it had a nice little wedge where we could lay another vertical member across it to form the top of the "teepee" style structure. The site was just inside the dune line, in an area that had no sea grass. It was perfect. I dug the hole for the 10" x 8" x 10" pressure treated cache that I had built in the shop.
We harvested verticals and laid them in, by burying them in the sand about 1 1/2 feet at a minimum. We found a couple of verticals that were very long, but not very straight, and eventually ended up being the head of Medusa.
We put in at least a dozen verticals that would allow us to use shorter horizontals. We placed the verticals at angles that allowed us to shingle the horizontals by leaning in toward the structure.
The structure protected the letterbox location. The cache was buried under 2-3 inches of sand near the back of the hut, next to our primary vertical.
Come to the Coast. Enjoy Medusa!! Hopefully, the structure will remain intact. If not, the cache will still be there, next to the one vertical that will undoubtedly be left behind by the ravages of the winds and seas.
Medusa is a great place for the kids to come play. I think the adults would enjoy it as well :)