Lee, I built my first starter dock a floater using treated lumber and plastic 55 gallon barrels you can get them at Coca-Cola plants or feed stores etc... Some places give them away for you to haul off. Other places sale them for about 6 to 10$ each. My first 10 x 10 dock built about 10 years ago was recently replaced with a l6 x 16 pier. Beam structure used was rail road ties. Deck and joist was treated lumber. Original floater cost me 500$ material. I got the barrels for free. The recent pier cost about 1300$ material including stain not shown here. Refer to this link
http://www.rockytoppers.com/the_pond.htm towards the middle of the page you can see both. The floater is beached because of our recent draught here in Texas. I took the opportunity to build the pier while it was dry. Plan to stain the floater and move it up to my other pond above. Barrels are cheap but the dock tends to move when you walk on it. Foam blocks are much better for floaters but can be pricey. Good luck. It will be hard for you to build a stationary dock while your pond is full of water. You would most likely have to have a pile driver come out to set the vertical post or drain your pond. This can be achieved by yourself if you have a boat stable enough to hold you while you use a large hand held post driver to drive 2 7/8 pipe deep enough in the bottom to hold up the structure. It will be very hard to square up. Good luck.
