I Was Almost Killed By Discarded Fishing Line!

[Scuba Chris]

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLQTfwpUoas