Properly Dispose Your Used Fishing Line!

For years i've pushed for anglers to clean-up their areas for others. I've stepped on a circle hook once & it was painful extracting it. I usually spend the first 10min cleaning someone else's mess before i set-up my gear. I'd rather see plastics in a garbage can rather then around a Sea Turtle's neck.

So this day i got to my site extremely early & started to set-up my shore casting rigs. I had enough natural light to see enough of my surroundings to maneuver around. I walked across a cliff overhang to set my first rig up & hopped over a open fissure as i've done for years. This time my foot got snagged & i went down through the fissure head first roughly 8ft to the reef. I was lucky a swell came in to cover the rocks with 2ft of water seconds before impact. I instinctively put my right hand forward to help break the fall.

The next thing i remember was gasping for air as i was swallowing salt water. My right wrist was in pain & my leg was torn-up scraping the rocks going down. My shorts was partially torn as my backside got a puncture. If things were different i could've been knocked-out, or worse. All because a fisherman left 100's of yards of discarded fishing line all over the sharp rocks. I was there 2 days earlier & no line was there. If this was thrown in the water it would kill endangered Green Sea Turtles which congregate in numbers exactly where i landed.

Right now i'm not sure if my right wrist is merely badly sprained or fractured. My right leg is hurting & my backside is not only hurting but constantly bleeding. At the early morning twilight hours i couldn't make out the fishing line. If the line was in the water it could kill many endangered local species like Green Sea Turtles to Hawaiian Monk Seals by entanglement.

I'm in extreme pain & don't know how long this will sideline me. This happen all because a lazy angler most likely decided to re-spool his/her casting reel & left all the line just laying around to cause injury & possible death to wildlife. I spent 30min just cutting that line up & disposing it in a garbage can that was only 60-80ft away!

Please pick-up after your selfs. I always bring garbage bags for exactly this. I'm sharing my story here in hopes it'll ring a bell that says respect your environment.

You were badly injured, bleeding, with a possibly broken wrist, and you spent 30 minutes cutting up all that line?

So I see what happened!

Just curious why would you be fishing around endangered Green Sea Turtles & Hawaiian Monk Seals seems like they would eat your bait. Then you've hurt them with your hook which I assume is barbless. You might consider wearing skateboard pads & helmet if fishing that spot it sounds very dangerous.

Not a lot of compassion here so far.....

Maybe because he wasn't really "almost killed". That said , I hate people who discard trash, especially in or near water. %@%# those people

Yeah, I see both sides of this. It sucks big time when dirtbags just discard fishing line and other trash that way. And I can see that the post did get injured.

But, it's rather reckless to be fishing such an area without proper footwear and some sort of full length pants for protection. One of the basic rules of jetty/rock/shore fishing on the ocean is that, from time to time, you WILL take a tumble. The video also seems a bit overly dramatized.

Play stupid games -- win stupid prizes. Then post stupid stories... Uh... I mean, raising awareness.

and then he made a PSA video.

The kind of people that leave a bunch of trash, aren't likely to change their ways from being told. They are very aware that what they are doing is wrong and [censored].

Yeah, this really sucks. I was filming a spearfishing segment for our youtube channel a couple weeks ago, sickening how much trash was on the bottom (Port Aransas jetty). I saw/pulled up three crab traps, two cast nets, 15 foldout chairs, a fishing reel, 3 rods and an uncountable number of mono leaders.

Thank you for cleaning up what you could. But did you almost die?

Thank you for cleaning up what you found.

If you were in California just think of what you could have started:
Crab traps made of bio-degradable straws
Cast nets made of bio-degradable crab traps
Folding chairs made out of really BIG bio-degradable straws
Fishing reels made out of bio-degradable 3-D printer media
Fishing rods that have safety lines to retrieve said rod if thrown into ocean in frustration at losing a steenking feesh.
Don't get me started on mono leaders . . . . .

In case you're wondering, I am currently in California and they are talking about BANNING plastic straws in the entire state. OK, this might be a good idea, but what about "BALANCING THE BUDGET"?

We're working on BANNING plastic straws and coffee stir sticks and the BUDGET is in the RED? ? ?

Personally, I cannot WAIT to return to Texas

That is all . . . . . carry on