Great Detectives: Easy Rawlins Mystery Cache
The WBs: This one needs a new home. Easy Rawlins will return!
Great Detectives: Easy Rawlins
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
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Related Web Page
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Cache is not at the listed coordinates. You’ll be seeking a camoed container about the size of a ping-pong ball. It’s located at a spot that is normally impossible for a cache container to be, but in this case it’s quite public, legal and safe. Substantial snow cover would pose a challenge.
Writer Walter Mosley introduced Ezekiel “Easy” Porterhouse Rawlins in 1990’s Devil in a Blue Dress. Denzel Washington portrayed Easy Rawlins in the 1995 film. Rawlins was a World War II Army veteran.
Despite the fact that all you need to play the classic game “Battleship” are 2 pencils and 2 pieces of paper, for several decades the Milton Bradley company (now part of Hasbro) has sold the game in various versions. In 2012 there was even a movie.
A solitaire puzzle version was invented in Argentina in the early 1980s and has become somewhat popular. From Wikipedia, here are the rules and strategies:
In Battleship, an armada of battleships is hidden in a square grid of 10×10 small squares. The armada includes one battleship four squares long, two cruisers three squares long, three destroyers two squares long, and four submarines one square in size. Each ship occupies a number of contiguous squares on the grid, arranged horizontally or vertically. The boats are placed so that no boat touches any other boat, not even diagonally.
The goal of the puzzle is to discover where the ships are located. A grid may start with clues in the form of squares that have already been solved, showing a submarine, an end piece of a ship, a middle piece of a ship, or water. Each row and column also has a number beside it, indicating the number of squares occupied by ship parts in that row or column, respectively.
The basic solving strategy for a Battleship puzzle is to add segments to incomplete ships where appropriate, draw water in squares that are known not to contain a ship segment, and to complete ships in a row or column whose number is the same as the number of unsolved squares in that row or column, respectively. More advanced strategies include looking for places where the largest ship that has not yet been located can fit into the grid, and looking for rows and columns that are almost complete and determining if there is only one way to complete them.
For our purposes you’ll need to solve several original, custom-made Battleship puzzles using the above rules. The armada sizes differ from puzzle to puzzle. Remember that ships cannot touch, not even diagonally.
N 41 1...
W 96 0...
Great Detective #27. For more information on puzzle caches by The WBs, use the "Related Web Page" link above. You can find a 2-page pdf of all the battleship puzzles there. Printing using the gc.com print utility will result in an 11-page printout.
Additional Hints
(No hints available.)