Traffic Cone Floating Buoy From the $1.25 Store With Upcycled Material

One of the things about living on a lake is, I would hope is obvious, is swimming at the lake. We also like to just sit in a floatie and relax on the lake, drink in hand optional. The problem is, if you want to jump off your floatie and take a dip, your floatie ends up on the other side of the lake, or you have to go back onshore to put your floatie away before you go swimming. Wouldn't if be great to just be able to anchor your floatie in the middle of the lake, slide off your floatie, to swim and then return to your floatie? You need a mooring buoy -- and here is one you can build for less than $4.

2 - traffic cones from the dollar (twenty-five) store

xxx - zip ties

4 - empty 1 liter plastic bottles

xxx - feet of paracord/rope from the dollar store.

xxx - rocks or weights, I had some nice metal rings, but anything will do.

What you are going to do is attach the cones together at the bottom, to make a symmetrical pylon. The bottom cone will fill with water and have weight to make the other cone stick straight up. If the upper cone is water tight all will float properly, but I just put in an empty 1 liter soda bottle sealed to ensure there will be a float.

On all 4 corners of the bases of the cones I drilled through to allow me to attach each of the cones to each other with zip ties on 2 opposite corners. the other 2 corners I used the yellow paracord to make loops so if you can tie off floats/boats to the pylon. Carbide clips on a short piece of rope on the floats work really well. My lake is about 12' deep so I needed about 20' of the pink paracord to make the anchor cable that attached at the bottom of the sunk cone and to the another 1 liter soda bottle that had holes in it so I could fill it with rocks and it won't hold air. this bottle is the anchor.

making sure the 20' anchor cable is not a twisted mess, take the pylon and anchor and give it a toss off the dock to where you basically like to float. You might have to shake it up a bit to get the air out of the bottom cone, but then the top cone will float perfectly straight. You then attach some rope to your floatie and have a bit extra to either tie to the string loops on the pylon, attach a carbide clip to clip onto the string loops, or at shown in the picture, make a bigger loop than goes over the pylon and the brim of the pylon will stop the floatie from pulling off of the pylon.