The End of the Line

Some of you may be aware of a scheme for recycling waste bits of fishing line, instead of disposing them in your rubbish bin, or elsewhere. I know that our members are pretty good at not leaving waste line on the river bank, because I very rarely find any, but we all have the problem of what to do with any bits we cut off, or find, when we get home.

The scheme I'm talking about is the ANLRS (Anglers National Line Recycling Scheme) and you can find out more at https://www.anglers-nlrs.co.uk/ . These folks collect old line from a network of centres around the country, and recycle it responsibly, but we don't expect everyone to visit those centres to deposit their collection of waste line. Instead, we have installed a special custom-built collector (MK1) at the Harpers Car Park.

This weird contraption is not a Little Owl nesting box (I hope) but the idea is that when you visit Harpers, you stuff any waste line you have into the spout at the top. It's angled down to keep the rain out, but just push your line in. Every so often, Nigel will (amongst the hundred and one other things he does for us) check the collector and remove the bottom section and extract the line, and take it to an ANLRS recycling centre.

That's all there is to it, except that if you don't have one of those fancy line collector gadgets (available from various fishing stores, for a frankly daft price) then you could do worse than get one of these.

If you haven't realised, this is just a nylon hair curler, and you can buy them online or elsewhere for very little. Just thread one on a cord or zinger on your fly vest, and you can just twist it around to collect any odd bits of line. They're remarkably cheap and effective.

Collecting up our bits of waste line is good for the fish, good for the wildlife on the riverbank, and even good for the environment as a whole, so please - donate whenever you visit Harpers. If it doesn't work well, or if you have any suggestions for improvement, do let me know.

I hope to see you on the Riverbank from 3rd April, or at the Work-Party on Saturday 29th.

Cheers

Peter