New and Not So New

Hi to everyone in the lettereboxing community,

My name is Stuart and I started letterboxing in the eighties with my father. I joined the Royal Navy at sixteen in 1989 and due to this have not been boxing since. I have a new partner now who lives in plymouth and she enjoys getting out on the moor at weekends. On one such trip, i happened to mention letterboxing to her and she became intrigued. After looking under rocks for about five minutes I managed to find one and explained in full the nature of the hobby. We agreed that we would take it on as our new hobby together and I said that even though I had already found 100 before (actually it was about 2000!!!) I would start from scratch again and join the 100 Club with her. For the past three weekends we have been to different parts of the moor and scavenged, managing to find 78 boxes (from past experience it helped knowing what to look for, tell tale signs etc lol). I do remember it being much harder than this in the eighties though, sometimes walking for hours to find just one box!!!

This weekend we are planning on going up again, to hopefully find the 22 we need for the 100, however, I am actually getting hacked off with not having any clues lol. I phoned Stephanie Paul today and found out some interesting information about myself. I first went to the meet in october 1986 and registered my first 100 stamps, this making my membership number 2700. Also, the traveller that my father and I used to carry (which I still have) was registered as number 3818 and is still registered!!! The book associated with the traveller I also have and was last stamped by someone in december 1988!!! I have been carrying this with me the last couple of weekends. Stephanie said that I could have a catalogue seeing as I'm still a member and now i'm happy

Also, I was wondering if anyone would PM me with any WOM clues for this weekend as i don't think i will get the catalogue in time for friday night when I want to start planning our walk for saturday (can't go up sunday cos my partner is running the plymouth half marathon). I am looking at going to king's tor or Hound Tor/Greator Rocks areas.

Our names our Stuart and Kirsty and we are going to have a boxing name of Beauty and the Beast, she is obviuosly the Beauty lol.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Welcome to the forum - since you stopped lookng for boxes back in the 80's a few things have changed - yes there are fewer boxes out on the moor and yes the catalogue is probably thinner than it used to be - since your boxing days The area around Wistmans Wood has been made into a Newtake and all the boxes were removed over a period.
The powers that be decided that boxes should only remain out on the moor for 5 years (unless renewed in the catalogue) and there is the Dartmoor Letterbox Thief who has found with the use of GPS can now steal boxes faster than some people can put them out.

But having said all that there are still thousands out there and I suspect there are more WOM boxes than catalogue boxes these days...