Manera Halo Kiteboarding Harness - Mid-Season Thoughts

Jake from MACkite here today with the 2022 Manera Halo harness. I wanted to provide a mid-season update on this to let you guys know what we're loving and what we're not loving.

I just came off the water with this bad boy today. One of the original problems I had with this is that I started with a size that was too small for my body. About two years ago, pre-pandemic, I was a medium. However, the medium just was not the right fit this year. I was feeling all of the hard shell and none of the adaptive, flexi, soft shell, so I found it was kind of bitey and harsh. If it locked into the right position on my body, it felt great, but if it moved at all I was not loving it.

So I grappled with that and came to terms with myself that I probably needed to be in a large, and that has made a world of difference. I am super stoked again on this harness now. Not that I wasn't stoked before, but it just wasn't quite the right fit for me. This large is really awesome. It allows me to get a better, looser fit with this flexi material, and that interfaces more comfortably with my body. It doesn't feel like it's overly tightened; it feels very comfortable and flexible without too much pull or tension.

The portion in the back provides a lot of the benefits you get with a hard shell, that stiffness and that absorption, but it doesn't pull a lot. It's honestly a harness that you sometimes forget you're even wearing because of how mellow and comfortable it is on your body. To achieve that, it's really a function of fit. If you don't love this thing at first, it's possible it's not for you, but it's also possible that you just didn't get the right size. For me, personally, now that I'm in the large I'm really stoked.

This harness came back to us with some damage on the back plate, and that's where the ability to swap things out on this harness makes it so awesome. Traditionally, if a typical harness gets damaged, sometimes we can patch it up, but it's probably going to go to the parts bin or the trash. With this harness, we disassembled it, popped a new back plate on, and it's good as new. It was really cool to experience that firsthand, having seen the bin of worn harnesses that really have just one lifecycle if something fluky happens or there's a defect. Now this harness is back at the shop and I'm riding it, so it's had two life spans now. As things wear out, and things will wear out, you can go ahead and swap them out. I guess we get into a little "Ship of Theseus" dilemma here: is it the same harness if you replace all the parts? You know... if you love it, heck yeah it is.

If you want to swap to a rope, you do so right on the back of the spreader bar by undoing some grommets, and that rope attachment is included with this. Some people have requested to just buy a second spreader bar. Because of the clips on either side, they come off really easily, so that makes it even faster to swap on the fly. I think that's a nice system and is something that we will see more of moving forward.

One little glitchy thing I found is the attachment system. It clips in really easily, but when I get to the end of the session and I'm fatigued, I do have to loosen the strap up a bit to get underneath the clip and pull it loose. It could just be because it hasn't seen a lot of use, or maybe I'm not leveraging it correctly, but at the end of the session I do have to put a little bit more effort into unhooking it to take it off.

To review, I still love this thing. I went from a medium to a large, and that made it super comfortable. I think the release can be a little bit glitchy, but that's a price I'm willing to pay for the simplicity. It works really well. It's a simple, comfortable harness and you can forget it's on you sometimes. It's freaking awesome. Thanks for checking us out. This has been Jake with MACkite.

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