The whole thing had the air of a high-level espionage operation. Darlene Fortin checked left and right to make sure no one was watching, then crouched and swiftly pulled a box out from under a bush. She checked the contents, then stashed it again.Ms Fortin is a “geocacher” or “cacher”. She takes part in a kind of scavenger hunt that uses global positioning systems (GPS) to find the “cache” essentially a treasure chest as part of The Bermuda Island Geocachers (BIG) club.“I have been doing this for almost four years,” said Ms Fortin. “I used to live in Canada. My boyfriend introduced geocaching to me.”At first she was sceptical and thought it sounded ridiculous, but she quickly got into it. When her boyfriend moved to Bermuda, leaving her in Canada, she needed something to do with her free time.“I started going to cachers' social events,” said Ms Fortin. “I became hard-core. I went all over the United States and Canada geocaching.”She moved to Bermuda and quickly fell in with the geocaching community here. She now helps to maintain about 90 percent of the almost 196 caches in Bermuda. The group she formed has 58 members.“I am trying to get Bermuda on the map because we are the smallest island that geocachers,” she said. “Despite our size, compared to the Caribbean there is only one country that has more caches than us and that is Puerto Rico, and that place is huge. Islands like Jamaica and Cayman have less than 40 caches, so we stand out. I would like to introduce it to more Bermudians. So many people have told me stories that they used to do scavenger hunts. This is a scavenger hunt, but high-tech.”There are three million caches hidden worldwide. The caches are divided into levels of difficulty based on how easy they are to access or how well they are hidden. The most accessible are given a rating of 1/1, meaning someone in a wheelchair or someone with a stroller could access it. The highest level is a 5/5. A cache on the International Space Station gets that rating for obvious reasons.Inside the cache are often little things like key chains, stickers, or coupons to nearby coffee shops. There is often also a little notebook for cache finders to log their names. Ms Fortin showed us one with several business cards people from California, Chicago and Pennsylvania had logged in the notebook. One couple wrote that they were in Bermuda on their honeymoon and had enjoyed finding the cache.Most caches in Bermuda are quite easy to find. Some can only be accessed with a snorkel and fins, and some need scuba gear. There is even one out on a private island, placed there with permission of the owner.“There was a group of geocachers who came to Bermuda on a cruise in April,” said Ms Fortin. “I flew to New Jersey, got on the cruise and came back to Bermuda with the group. There were 35 cachers on that cruise. I have also met one couple who came here in February. They did all the caching on land, but they also wanted to do the ones underwater. It was too cold so they are coming back in September. This is really good for tourism.”There are several caches planted in Royal Naval Dockyard which, in the last three years, have been visited by more than 400 cachers, mostly off the cruise ships.Sometimes people leave special tags in the box. The tags have a unique number on them and are usually attached to something like a keychain. The next person to find the cache takes the tag, logs the number into a website and then leaves it in another location. The tags can be ordered from www.geocachers.com. Ms Fortin placed a tag in a cache and, through the website, saw it move from Hawaii to California to Belgium and then Germany.“It disappeared in Germany,” said Ms Fortin. “It probably got muggled.”People who are not geocachers who spot geocaching activities are called “muggles” after the non-magical characters in JK Rowling's 'Harry Potter' books. If muggles get into the caches and tamper with them or destroy them, cachers say, very sorrowfully, that they have been “muggled”.“It is very disappointing because they are ruining a very fun game,” said Ms Fortin. “Also sometimes people have their tags in there and they disappear.”To geocache, you need a hand-held GPS device. Costs vary but iPhone and Blackberry both have apps you can download for between $6 and $20. Using the device or app you type in the longitude and latitude coordinates of the cache, which can be found on a special website. The GPS device then directs you to the stash. It may also tell you a bit about the area.If you are interested in geocaching contact Ms Fortin at Darlenedavid2008@gmail.com or bermudaislandgeocachers@gmail.comor visit www.bermudaislandgeocachers.com . People can try it for free, and if they like it can pay $30 to become full members of the club.Useful website: www.geocaching.com.