tale of the Lost GPS

Last Sunday I was out round Stromlo thrashing the new cranks (yes I know I need to do the follow up...) and somewhere around the back my Garmin 705 flew out of it's mount and either onto the track or into the bushes at the side of the trail.

By the time I realised it was missing I had no idea where over the last 7k or so it would have detached itself. So I had a real problem, I had to be back home by 11AM for a kids birthday party on pain of death and I knew I couldn't ride the trails backwards without causing and accident. So going at Mach 5 around to the last place I had looked at it before slowing to a crawl to try and scan the track for the GPS.

When I had covered about 1/2 of the 7k's I mentally had written the unit off as lost and was thinking whether I wanted to shell out another $500 for a replacement. I got back to the trail without sighting the GPS and it was off home for fun and games with a bunch of kids for the afternoon.

During the week I mentioned to Big Jase I had lost the GPS and I got the normal commiserations and the rest, but two days later I get a text from him saying a mate of his Garry had found my GPS and I could get it back this weekend.

So I met up with Jase before the race and he told me the story, "Apparently a couple of riders had found the GPS and given it to Garry because he had one and might be able to work out who it belongs to. So Garry scrolled through the history on the Garmin and found that all the files had power data attached to them. At that point he phoned Jase because he knew he trained with a power meter and might know if someone had lost one."

So I got it back today, a couple of extra scratches and I checked the ride file and it looks as though the thing died after about 17.5hrs....longer then what Garmin quotes for battery life. So a big thank you to everyone that passed on the lost unit!