Back to: Gear Selection

The last component of gear selection is hardware, the metal connection pieces that help hold different components of the system together. In general, when thinking about hardware, we recommend minimizing its use when you can, as these are common points of failure in the system. That said, it can be really useful in certain situations. In addition to hardware, many connection points in your arrays are joined with knots or by splicing lines together. We’ll touch on these common points of connection in the Gear Prep course when it comes time to build your arrays.

Hardware Influencing Factors

Use hardware connections only as needed, they create opportunities for failure.

This graphic represents common pieces of hardware used in kelp farming. Most of the hardware tends to be concentrated down towards the bottom of the system, near or attached to the anchor. 

Common pieces of hardware used in kelp farming

Chain

• Not all farm designs incorporate chain, but if you live in an area with a big tidal range it can help keep a constant level of tensioning.
• The general recommendation is that the chain makes up 10% of the total distance of your anchor rode.

Shackle

• Used to connect chain to anchor.

Pear Link

• Creates a point of increased surface area so that we have a place to tie our anchor line to, and then connect it to the anchor with a shackle.
• The important point here is to make sure you have enough surface area to get a really tight and good connection between your line and the metal hardware to reduce chafe.

Swivel

• A swivel can be incorporated into your anchor rigging to keep the line from getting wrapped around your anchor or twisting.

C-Link

• And the C-link is used in the 5-line array to connect the growline to another short line attached to the spreader bar, called a pigtail. This allows for precise tensioning and quick and easy release.

Soft Shackle

• The soft shackle can be used Line to line connections.
• Growline to buoy line, 5-line array bridal.

The piece of “hardware” we’re most fond of is actually not hard at all! We use Dyneema soft shackles on our farm in lots of different places: to connect our buoy lines to our growline, to connect our growline to our anchor lines, and to gather the bridal lines on the 5-line array, etc. Dyneema is a type of fiber that is 15-times stronger than steel. You can easily make soft shackles at home with this great tutorial.

Soft Shackle Tutorial