Courses / Gear Prep

Course Content

A Note for First-Year Farmers
Plan a Farm. Plant a Garden.
Buy & Source Your Gear
Bring Your Farm Design to Life Create a Gear List Purchase Equipment Store & Organize Your Gear
Prep Your Lines
Identify Different Lines Measure & Cut Your Lines
Splice Connection Points
Assemble Your Arrays
Lay Out the System Learn Your Knots
Connection Points
Anchor System Overview Anchor to Chain Anchor to Line Anchor to Tag Line Chain to Anchor Line Tensioning Buoy Anchor Line to Growline Anchor Line to Anchor Buoy 5-Line Array Anchor Line to Bridle Spreader Bar to Growlines Spreader to Vertical Bridle Growline Buoys to Growline Mid-Line Spreaders to Growline
Resources & Tools
Farm Design Forum
Farm Operations Forum
Lesson 3 Prep Your Lines

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Splice Connection Points

As you’re assembling your gear, one important skill you’ll want to learn to master is how to splice line. Splicing is a technique of unraveling a multi-stranded line and braiding it back together to create a loop or eye. It’s also used to connect two different lines together.

A fid is an essential tool for splicing. As you’re preparing your gear, you’ll likely want to invest in both a small and a large fid to be able to effectively part different diameter lines.

Splicing gives you multiple advantages.

  1. Precision & Consistency

    It allows you to be precise and consistent about the length of your lines in the water, since you’ve predetermined your connection points by splicing in loops instead of tying knots, which can vary in placement.

  2. A Cleaner System

    It creates a much cleaner system in the water. Loose ends and tails often collect biofouling over the course of the season. Having a cleanly spliced line with a clear connection point can reduce confusion and help you understand what’s going on in your system.

Different types of splices

Definition

Short or Long Splice

A short or a long splice is used to join two lines together to create a longer line.

Short or Long Splice Photo Gallery
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This video shows how to make a short or long splice.

Definition

Eye-splice

An eye-splice is used to form an eye or loop at the end of a line. This splice can also be used to attach a piece of metal hardware, such as a c-link or thimble within the eye.

Eye Splice Photo Gallery
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This video shows how to splice an eye into a line to make a loop or attach a c-link.

On the GreenWave farm, we use soft shackles as an alternative to hardware to link different gear components within the array system near the surface. Soft shackles are essentially a braided ring, made from Dyneema line, which is 15-times stronger than steel and can be used in place of a shackle, thimble, or metal ring.1 We find they are exceptionally useful for connecting different parts of the system in the water, so you can tie fewer knots, be more precise with the measurements of different components of the system, and have fewer points of failure. We use them to connect our anchor line to our 5-line array bridle, splice them into our growlines at intervals to connect with buoy lines, and keep a bucket of them around to have at the ready for other needs.

1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/dyneema

This video shows how to splice soft shackles from Dyneema line.
With a little bit of practice, you can make soft shackles with only Dyneema line and a fid.