How to build a 5/5 Geocache buoy from scratch?

[+Snoogans]

I have been working very closely with my local Parks and Rec staff recently. I asked for and received permission to place a buoy in the lake at my closest local park to hide a 5/5 water cache.

 

My first thought was to just get the kind you can buy at Academy and weight a 50 cal. ammo can down on the anchor chain.

 

Then I thought it would be more interesting to have the bouy as the cache itself.

 

Anyone have any idea how I would go about building one?

 

I was thinking about maybe a water heater vessel end cut off, weighted, and then sealed to make an airtight chamber leaving the upper portion as the cache.... Or something like that.......

 

Anyone got any ideas on how to accomplish this feat.... Or should I just go the easy route?

 

Anyone is free to borrow the idea.... BTW- Has anything like this been seen before?

 

Easy: (just go buy it)

 

Hard: (make one to look something like a GPS tracking buoy)

[+Kit Fox]

I could easily see the bouy being a five star terrain cache because of the watercraft requirement. If the cache is floating on the surface, in plane view, how would this qualify as a five star difficulty? It seems like an easy find.

 

Cool idea!

[+StarBrand]

I could easily see the bouy being a five star terrain cache because of the watercraft requirement. If the cache is floating on the surface, in plane view, how would this qualify as a five star difficulty? It seems like an easy find.

 

Cool idea!

You read my mind - was just thinking the same thing.

[+trainlove]

Probably because the bouy is a decoy and the bison tube is at the bottom of the anchor?

[+KoosKoos]

Probably because the bouy is a decoy and the bison tube is at the bottom of the anchor?

 

It's a nano, inside a knot in the anchor rope of course!

 

And yes, very cool idea!

[+tomfuller & Quill]

Make the buoy stage 1 of a multi. Mark the azimuth and distance to the final which can be either on land or on the bottom in shallow water. Does the lake freeze over in winter? Does the water level fluctuate a lot during the year or from year to year? If you really want to make it a 5 difficulty, use a really hard puzzle on the cache page to find the buoy.

[+9Key]

Make the buoy stage 1 of a multi. Mark the azimuth and distance to the final which can be either on land or on the bottom in shallow water. Does the lake freeze over in winter? Does the water level fluctuate a lot during the year or from year to year? If you really want to make it a 5 difficulty, use a really hard puzzle on the cache page to find the buoy.

Some very good ideas there!

 

I wouldn't make the bouy the cache container as muggles *will* screw with it.

[+scuba dude]

The problem I see with this is keeping the cache dry. No matter how water proof your container is, it will surely get some type of grit or debris to foul the o-ring and drown your cache. Another problem I see is one of bouyancies. A 50-cal can filled with concrete doesn't really "weigh" that much under water. You need to make sure that your anchor is much heavier underwater than the bouyancy rating of your surface marker. You will easily need 50# or more to securely anchor your float. Or else you need to have a lot of rode on your chain. Becuase if the water level raises, and the bouy floats the anchor, there's no telling where it will end up.

 

I could see this a leg in a multi with coords or clues written or attached to the bouy.

Edited November 14, 2007 by scuba dude

[rogheff]

Make it a night cache, suspended just below the surface (in a no-boat area of course)

[+Team GeoBlast]

I have been working very closely with my local Parks and Rec staff recently. I asked for and received permission to place a buoy in the lake at my closest local park to hide a 5/5 water cache.

 

My first thought was to just get the kind you can buy at Academy and weight a 50 cal. ammo can down on the anchor chain.

 

Then I thought it would be more interesting to have the bouy as the cache itself.

 

Anyone have any idea how I would go about building one?

 

I was thinking about maybe a water heater vessel end cut off, weighted, and then sealed to make an airtight chamber leaving the upper portion as the cache.... Or something like that.......

 

Anyone got any ideas on how to accomplish this feat.... Or should I just go the easy route?

 

Anyone is free to borrow the idea.... BTW- Has anything like this been seen before?

 

Easy: (just go buy it)

 

Hard: (make one to look something like a GPS tracking buoy)

 

Great idea.. for a cache and a thread.

 

As you know, the age old problem with a water cache is the water. Just a few ideas that come immediately for the easy route, I'll need to give the more custom route a little more thought.

 

1. Purchase a store bought buoy and make it into a container. Inside the modified buoy/container, put the actual cache in a proven waterproof container inside. The challenge here is ensuring that the modified buoy is water tight enough and can be taken apart and put back together while retaining a seal. If there was a way to keep the modified end out of the water that will help with the longevity.

2. Even easier route. Purchase a buoy and anchor it as normal. Run an additional line down and attached an underwater slate to it. This is less spectacular but taking the entry into a cache with swag in it out of the equation eliminates a lot of human error which is the other problem with a water cache.

3. Easiest route. Purchase a buoy and anchor it as normal. Put the coords on the buoy for another stage in a multi. This is probably going to be the least amount of heartache for maintenance.

4. Another twist on #3 would be to anchor the buoy so it is just under the waterline but visible from the surface. This would help with muggles and add some stars to the difficulty of the cache.

 

GPS relay beacon? I think a rule of thumb with a cache of this nature is the more elaborate you get, the more time you are going to be spending in the water maintaining it. Bravo for even considering it!

 

I have seen a buoy cache but it was on dry land and it probably was not sea worthy.

Edited November 14, 2007 by Team GeoBlast

[+uminski]

Greetings,

It was writen>>>It's a nano, inside a knot in the anchor rope of course!

 

I would not suggest placing the nano within the braided line above or below the water.

 

I notice the pennant lines (lines from Bow to anchor) on my boat get very slimy from algae below the water line. Within a few months, after installing new lines, the line may be difficult to handle from algea growth and locate a hidden nano may be very difficult.

 

Nylon lines tend to shrink and get stiff with time. So, Above the water line, someone may need to use a knive to free the container from the line.

 

Any paper items in this environment will not last long.

 

REgards

 

Uminski

[+scuba dude]

4. Another twist on #3 would be to anchor the buoy so it is just under the waterline but visible from the surface. This would help with muggles and add some stars to the difficulty of the cache.

 

Depending on the body of water this may be a BAD idea. If motor vessels are allowed on the water, then a submerged object like that could cause thousands in damage to the boat that hits it with their prop or snags it on thier skeg, or a swim ladder that didn't get raised.

[+egami]

4. Another twist on #3 would be to anchor the buoy so it is just under the waterline but visible from the surface. This would help with muggles and add some stars to the difficulty of the cache.

 

Depending on the body of water this may be a BAD idea. If motor vessels are allowed on the water, then a submerged object like that could cause thousands in damage to the boat that hits it with their prop or snags it on thier skeg, or a swim ladder that didn't get raised.

 

True, and honestly if saw a buoy just under the waterline while boating I'd be more apt to go to it and check it out, not less.

[Cape Cod Cacher]

You could walk to it if it was in Georgia now...

[+Team GeoBlast]

4. Another twist on #3 would be to anchor the buoy so it is just under the waterline but visible from the surface. This would help with muggles and add some stars to the difficulty of the cache.

 

Depending on the body of water this may be a BAD idea. If motor vessels are allowed on the water, then a submerged object like that could cause thousands in damage to the boat that hits it with their prop or snags it on thier skeg, or a swim ladder that didn't get raised.

 

True, and honestly if saw a buoy just under the waterline while boating I'd be more apt to go to it and check it out, not less.

 

Very good point and an indication that I am from a state that has no lakes. Assuming the visibility is good enough, how about 10-15 feet down?

[+egami]

4. Another twist on #3 would be to anchor the buoy so it is just under the waterline but visible from the surface. This would help with muggles and add some stars to the difficulty of the cache.

 

Depending on the body of water this may be a BAD idea. If motor vessels are allowed on the water, then a submerged object like that could cause thousands in damage to the boat that hits it with their prop or snags it on thier skeg, or a swim ladder that didn't get raised.

 

True, and honestly if saw a buoy just under the waterline while boating I'd be more apt to go to it and check it out, not less.

 

Very good point and an indication that I am from a state that has no lakes. Assuming the visibility is good enough, how about 10-15 feet down?

 

Well, again, I am not sure this buys you anything...I've boated in the ocean, the Mississippi, murky lakes, clear lakes....imo, the most likely candidate for that would be an extremely calm, clear lake and I think the same inherent problem exists because boat traffic is truly sporatic and unpredictable I believe Muggling would be extremely likely...I guess in my mind the best bet is to have it simulate something in place which would be just a regular old buoy.

 

That's just my opinion from my boating experience.

[+Team GeoBlast]

4. Another twist on #3 would be to anchor the buoy so it is just under the waterline but visible from the surface. This would help with muggles and add some stars to the difficulty of the cache.

 

Depending on the body of water this may be a BAD idea. If motor vessels are allowed on the water, then a submerged object like that could cause thousands in damage to the boat that hits it with their prop or snags it on thier skeg, or a swim ladder that didn't get raised.

 

True, and honestly if saw a buoy just under the waterline while boating I'd be more apt to go to it and check it out, not less.

 

Very good point and an indication that I am from a state that has no lakes. Assuming the visibility is good enough, how about 10-15 feet down?

 

Well, again, I am not sure this buys you anything...I've boated in the ocean, the Mississippi, murky lakes, clear lakes....imo, the most likely candidate for that would be an extremely calm, clear lake and I think the same inherent problem exists because boat traffic is truly sporatic and unpredictable I believe Muggling would be extremely likely...I guess in my mind the best bet is to have it simulate something in place which would be just a regular old buoy.

 

That's just my opinion from my boating experience.

 

Cool.. any ideas on how do that?

[+KoosKoos]

4. Another twist on #3 would be to anchor the buoy so it is just under the waterline but visible from the surface. This would help with muggles and add some stars to the difficulty of the cache.

 

Depending on the body of water this may be a BAD idea. If motor vessels are allowed on the water, then a submerged object like that could cause thousands in damage to the boat that hits it with their prop or snags it on thier skeg, or a swim ladder that didn't get raised.

 

True, and honestly if saw a buoy just under the waterline while boating I'd be more apt to go to it and check it out, not less.

 

Very good point and an indication that I am from a state that has no lakes. Assuming the visibility is good enough, how about 10-15 feet down?

 

I'm not sure of the exact body of water that Snoogans has planned, but having grown up a bit north of where he is, I'd be surprised to hear that he can find water with 18" visibility in his part of the world.

[+KoosKoos]

Or...make your buoy completely submersible and provide caches a way to raise it, finding the submerged container below it....found this one:

 

Submersible water ski course

[+ZSandmann]

Too thick to drink, too thin to plow is the expression that comes to mind.

 

I keep envisioning the little escape pod, bouy thing James Bond uses in one of the older movies, can't remember which one it was.

 

On topic: If it is a foam bouy you could hollow out a place in it to stick an Otter Box (which is the most water tight container I know) with a sharp knife of a drill. Then stretch some rubber such as an innertube or bit of the stuff scuba suits are made out of over the whole buoy. The scuba material could even be sewn into a sort of bouy sock. This would hold the cache firmly inside the bouy, allow for easy removal for cache retrieval, and hide your cache.

Edited November 14, 2007 by ZSandmann

[+Too Tall John]

What comes to mind for me when talking about a buoy looks a bit like this:

On the ones I've seen, the Eyebolt and the Swivel are on either end of a rod that runs through the center of the buoy through a channel. The rod assembly isn't tight against the sides of the channel, so the buoy is made to be water tight w/out the rod being there. If it were removed, it would float away, but...

 

If you could figure out a way to secure the anchor to the buoy without having the tension from the eyebolt, a cache could simply be dropped down into the channel, perhaps attached to the eyebolt for easier retrieval. It would look like a regulation buoy.

 

The one downside to my plan is that it doesn't take into account what would happen when a muggle tried to moor his boat onto your buoy using the eyebolt/cache.

[+Snoogans]

I could easily see the bouy being a five star terrain cache because of the watercraft requirement. If the cache is floating on the surface, in plane view, how would this qualify as a five star difficulty? It seems like an easy find.

 

Cool idea!

 

I anticipated boaters messing with it even though people seldom use the lake for boating. You would need a tool to open the cache. There would be 2 hand holds for leverage.

 

This is a small community lake that is just a few acres. It is over 25 feet deep right now.

 

The google satellite map of this cache is no longer correct. 4 of the 5 lakes are now connected. It took a year to make the current improvements to the park.

 

The cache would be in the middle of the large lake on the left.

[+tomfuller & Quill]

Looks like you have some good cache saturation going on here Snoogans. I still like the multi idea putting the final either along the powerline at least 528 feet SW of ABCC cache or along the south edge of the lake.

You could even slightly move or archive one of your "In Memory Of.." caches if that works better.

Looking at the topo I didn't see roads or parking lots within the Park.

You could also mark on the buoy XXX feet at YYY azimuth from the final of my mystery cache. That would certainly up the difficulty factor.

Having already had 1 cache float away, I'll keep my hides away from the water. If you have a big old tree that hangs out over the water, hang the directions or coords from it so that they can only be found by boat.

[Mag Magician]

I played with a hydro cache idea for months before finally resolving myself to the fact that visibility is greater when you want something hidden than when you want it seen. One of my caches is an underwater case for a video camera. No matter how deep I placed it on an anchor line, it was too visible, even though you can't see your own fishing lure more than 2 feet down in the lake I am using. Because this is an active cache, I will not go into details about how it is hidden in an open forum. Suffice it to say that the anchor line is no longer visible, either.

If your idea is to work, you need to resolve the visibility issue (as with a bison inside a braided nylon rope), and with the log remaining writable. Underwater paper is available which will take any lead pencil to make a legible entry, and can be written on underwater. I used this paper doing underwater wreck surveys and although semi expensive, it is fantastic for legibility and longevity.

Good luck with your cache.

[+Snoogans]

Looks like you have some good cache saturation going on here Snoogans. I still like the multi idea putting the final either along the powerline at least 528 feet SW of ABCC cache or along the south edge of the lake.

You could even slightly move or archive one of your "In Memory Of.." caches if that works better.

Looking at the topo I didn't see roads or parking lots within the Park.

You could also mark on the buoy XXX feet at YYY azimuth from the final of my mystery cache. That would certainly up the difficulty factor.

Having already had 1 cache float away, I'll keep my hides away from the water. If you have a big old tree that hangs out over the water, hang the directions or coords from it so that they can only be found by boat.

 

I would have to consult my reviewer, but I don't think any of the caches surrounding the lake would need to be moved. The .1 guideline exists so someone doesn't stumble across one cache while looking for another one. I think 5 star terrain would rule out that possibility in this case, but not every case.

 

I want the cache to be IN the lake. The shore is too well fished to hide anything other than a micro there and I want this to be a decent sized cache for the effort.

 

The satellite photo is well over a year old. There are roads, parking, restrooms, bridges, pavilions, and a 4 level observation deck. 4 of the 5 lakes in the sat photo ar now one BIG lake. The one in the upper right is still a single.

[+ZSandmann]

Hey Snoogans do you think something along the lines of my idea has any merit? Instead of it actually being an openable bouy you would only need a cheap foam bouy, a couple of cinder blocks or a bit of I-beam would be sufficient weight for an anchor in a lake like this one.

[+egami]

I want the cache to be IN the lake. The shore is too well fished to hide anything other than a micro there and I want this to be a decent sized cache for the effort.

 

I am thinking the biggest concern you'll have that someone brought up is keeping it dry. I like the gist of the idea though.

[+trainlove]

You could walk to it if it was in Georgia now...

 

And you could walk to it if you were in Massachusetts around next month. But you would be totally unable to get it.

[+Too Tall John]

You could walk to it if it was in Georgia now...

And you could walk to it if you were in Massachusetts around next month...

Well, I wouldn't walk to it in Texas, too far. Really, Georgia is, too. Heck, even Massachusetts is to far to walk from the middle of New Hampshire. Think I'd drive.

 

On Topic:

4 of the 5 lakes in the sat photo ar now one BIG lake. The one in the upper right is still a single.

How deep is the water now where those burms that separated the lake were? I think you can see where I'm going...

 

Perhaps the walking comments weren't so off...

[+Team GeoBlast]

I could easily see the bouy being a five star terrain cache because of the watercraft requirement. If the cache is floating on the surface, in plane view, how would this qualify as a five star difficulty? It seems like an easy find.

 

Cool idea!

 

I anticipated boaters messing with it even though people seldom use the lake for boating. You would need a tool to open the cache. There would be 2 hand holds for leverage.

 

This is a small community lake that is just a few acres. It is over 25 feet deep right now.

 

The google satellite map of this cache is no longer correct. 4 of the 5 lakes are now connected. It took a year to make the current improvements to the park.

 

The cache would be in the middle of the large lake on the left.

 

It looks like you already have a pretty good idea of what you want to do. Having already displayed my lack of freshwater lake/ boating knowledge, I will ask a question. In those pictures you posted, the option with the GPS beacon on it.. would that cause problems if a boat hit it? It looks like it is hard and could do some damage. Otherwise, it is certainly the more interesting of the option that you are considering.

[+egami]

It looks like you already have a pretty good idea of what you want to do. Having already displayed my lack of freshwater lake/ boating knowledge, I will ask a question. In those pictures you posted, the option with the GPS beacon on it.. would that cause problems if a boat hit it? It looks like it is hard and could do some damage. Otherwise, it is certainly the more interesting of the option that you are considering.

 

It could be possible he is in a "no wake" lake. If that's the case it's probably six of one, half dozen a dozen of the other, but it sounded like he would be constructing it either way and that's a very sound point...it'd be a good idea to construct it in a manner which would be collision-friendly.

 

That one in the picture sure appears to be metal.

[+shellbn4]

You could walk to it if it was in Georgia now...

 

Your right about that. Ive been wanting to place one underwater here. Only problem there is NO water. The docks are laying on the bottom of the lake floor.The spot i had originally planned on placing it was 10 ft under water is now 15 ft on land.