Haul It Away

So, for my idea regarding a project, I decided to do something that's obviously very important to me.  You see, growing up in Michigan, I spent a lot of time outdoors.  My parents took my brother and I on 2 week long camping trips every summer all over the Upper Peninsula, and they were the coolest trips ever. My dad taught me how to fish when I was 4, and I've been addicted ever since.  I never played very many video games (save for NES) but instead was either catching snakes, frogs, and turtles outside, or going hunting or of course, fishing. My dad taught me to love the outdoors, and it's the greatest gift (I think) a father can bestow on a son, and I am eternally grateful for it.  He taught me to never leave traces of your passage, always picking up your trash and if you have room in your pockets and hands, the trash other people leave behind.  And that was almost 20 years ago now.

So that's why my project is focusing around River cleanups.  You see, rivers belong to everyone.  They are a rare resource in this world, and they are of no use to anyone if their banks and bottoms are coated in aluminum cans, shoes, tires, or even worse, old fishing hooks, lead weight and monafilament fishing line.  Those are the so-called "big 3" because they do not bio degrade and can be outright lethal to wildlife.  I consider myself to be a steward of the rivers, (as any self respecting trout bum would) so therefore it's only fair that I do my part to remove as much river-trash as possible and lead by example, hoping that other anglers see what I do and then, the seed is planted.  Everyone deserves the right to be able to spend the day on a river and not see a single strand of line, or a beer can.  It adds to that wilderness experience, something people nowadays don't get.  So if I can clean up a stretch of water and restore that feeling to the next person that comes to the river, it's worth it.  I plan on enacting this plan on every river I go to, be it the Pere Marquette for steelhead, or the Au Sable for trophy brown trout.  And you can bet there'll be pictures of what I collect and what it looks like afterwords.  I want to try and collect 3 miles of monofilament line.

see you on the river,
Brian