lowsec exploration - day 1

I got my first real bite of lowsec exploration last night, and I gotta say I really enjoyed it!
My evening started on a bit of a downer, the wife had had a bad day at work and I knew that meant eve time would be limited as she needed some cheering up. I did however manage to get on for a couple of hours, the first thing I noticed was a few of my contracts had sold and I was now sitting on 200 mill of isk…that to many of you isn’t much but I normally don’t have that much liquid isk …as a pirate it was boom or bust and I spent it before id earnt it most of the time. I however am not blowing this isk as it is my “pilgrim fund” my CEO is building it to reduce cost and then I will fit it out and replace the arbitrator I am using for exploration with it.
After running through my email’s and assessing my isk I decided to get looking for a site to run, I have been working on my scanning skills and thought I should find something.. and I did, I stayed in super sekrit base system (not that secret but as Btek is at war I wont tell them where to look). I undocked in my covert ops frigate “sneaky ass” and saw a myrmidon sitting 13 k off the station, I quickly hit warp to safe as he tried to lock me, unable to activate cloak that close to the station, I entered warp as he yellow boxed me and was away.. I de cloaked at the safe for a min or two as I launched 5 probes and re cloaked and headed on my way, stealthy is fun!
I found a lot of static sites in the system that could be found by d scan ..i wasn’t really interested in these at the moment, im looking for hidden complex’s so people have to work to find me, I had 2 such sigs in the system 1 radar 1 mag site.. I went for the radar first as it had the harder sig to scan.
The site took a good 30 min’s to scan down at the death I had it to 98.95% with probes scanning at 0.5 au on top of it, I learned here two important lessons for scanning, firstly I managed to get to 100% by moving all of the probes closer to the sig, which means the strength varies within the scan sphere ..I didn’t know that I always thought the strength remained constant within the radius you set to scan. Secondly I learned I need to invest in a set of prospector implants, unless some kind reader of this blog is willing to donate them that will be in a few months time.
Once I did have the site to 100% I bookmarked and warped back to the station, the system was devoid of life as it normally is and it seemed a good time to run the site, I swapped the cov ops for my arbitrator “dora 1” and undocked warping to the site at 20 km …no bad guys 5 hackable cans. Great! On hacking the first can a NPC cruiser spawned, I sent a flight of warrior 2’s to eat him while I finished hacking the first can, as I emptied the can of its salvage and a skill book the cruiser went pop, still over 30 km away.
The rest of the cans failed to spawn a single enemy, the closest I got to a fight was a scout for a passing fleet mentioned in local he was a reader of the blog and thought it might be fun to probe me out, but he didn’t, and I was pretty sure id be able to finish the site and dock up before he scanned the site out, we did have a friendly chat in local as I always try to if I come across people that read the blog, and he seemed like a pretty decent guy ( to be honest I wouldn’t have minded if he did try to scan me down and pop me, it is lowsec and if your able.. just keep in mind I bite back ).
In the end I docked up with 1 skill book 1 blueprint a shit load of salvage and a few datacores..not bad for 45 mins work. Plus it wasn’t dull. I even got a sec gain for killing the NPC cruiser, bonus all round. I was about to go do the Mag site when the wife decided play time was up and she needed some spoiling. So I logged off a happy bunny.

O and before I leave you 2 other things .. the Russian corp that wardec’ed us “kingdom of shadow”, made of fail. A supposed PVP corp , we have only ever seen 2 of them..ever and they have never attacked. We currently have 0 losses. It just seems a massive waste of time and money on their part.
Secondly a blog to recommend by a corp mate
tgl3, check it out its pretty good, also mentions me from time to time lol.

Fly sneaky all