Jan ‘22 - New Pabay Seaweed Farm Installed

It remains busy at KelpCrofters (too busy to update websites, even!).  After many months over the hot summer of 2021 working with heavy chain, huge buoys and heavy rope, we deployed the mooring infrastructure for our new seaweed farm in the waters south of Pabay in September.  This mooring grid extends across our leased area of 13Ha, with heavy ‘gable’ ropes able to support around 6-8 kilometres of growing lines.  

All the mooring infrastructure is recycled from local salmon farm operations, and is well suited for our purposes. The strong mooring grid supports 4 parallel, heavy ‘gable’ ropes, into which are tied two grids of growing lines.  We are confident that this mooring infrastructure is more than capable of withstanding the demands placed upon it, meaning we can sleep well at night through the storms of winter!

Deploying all this heavy equipment was a real excitement in September, and we were blessed with calm waters over the three days we hired the big workboat, ‘Lyra de Vega’.

Soon after, we were seeding kelp spore onto twine in the lab, and preparing for our next season of growth. There was a lot to do on the farm, tweaking and completing the growing grid, ready to receive the seeded twine in October.  This season we have deployed 3km of seeded rope at Pabay, with a mix of Atlantic wakame (Alaria) and Sugar kelp (Saccharina), and anticipate easily doubling this procedure next season. 

We will also seed Scalpay in January, once a second batch of seeded twine is ready, and Ailsa, our steadfast workboat, has received a bit of much needed TLC. Our energies are also now turning to constructing a harvesting barge from recycled plastic pipe, and setting up kelp drying infrastructure.