Tangle Free Waters hosts line sorting party

Mammoth Lakes Recreation seeks volunteers to sort discarded fishing line and prepare it for recycling

Mammoth Lakes Recreation will be hosting a Tangle Free Waters “line sorting party” on Friday, Nov. 17. The event will take place from 3 to 7 p.m. at the Mammoth Lakes Community Center, located at 1000 Forest Trail in Mammoth Lakes.

“Thanks to volunteers and staff, an enormous amount of monofilament fishing line has been collected this season through our Tangle Free Waters program,” Mammoth Lakes Recreation stated. But the organization says that collecting the discarded fishing line is really just the first step in the process. Volunteers are needed to help sort the collected lines and free it of debris and fishing tackle before it gets packaged to ship for recycling.

Volunteers are invited to join the line sorting party at any time during the event and stay as long as they can. According to MLR, food and drinks will be available to volunteers during the event. It is not necessary to bring anything to the line sorting party, but leather gloves and scissors are recommended.

“To fully close the circle, we need to make sure the line gets recycled and doesn’t end up in the landfill where it can entangle birds and be ingested by wildlife the same as it would at our lakes,” Mammoth Lakes Recreation stated. The line gets recycled by Berkely Conservation Institute into new fishing line and components of artificial reefs and fish habitats. Since 1990, Berkely Conservation Institute has recycled more than nine million miles of fishing line.

For generations, monofilament fishing line has been an essential part of many fisherman’s tackle box. Unfortunately, the same attributes that make monofilament an ideal choice for fishing line — high tensile strength, low visibility, and