By Founder and President Kurt Lieber
ODA has been working with Lloyd Johnson and his merry band of Maui divers for a little over 3 years now. I’ve been astounded by the amount of lead fishing weights, lines, and hooks they remove on a regular basis.
One of the places they visit regularly to remove any accumulated abandoned fishing equipement is Papawai Point - a beautiful place. At least from the surface it is beautiful. We want to keep the underwater habitat beautiful, too.
Last year, in June, I was talking with Lloyd about it and asked if he could set aside all the hooks that they removed. I thought it would be helpful to show you all the different sizes, shapes, and configurations these hooks come in.
I got a chance to see them firsthand when I landed on Maui 2 weeks ago, on October 30th.
Lloyd met me near the airport and surprised me with this insane number of hooks. In all, they weighed a little over 50 pounds.
Having no clue how many hooks there actually were, I randomly pulled out 5 pounds and counted the hooks and then separated them into categories.
In that 5-poundlot were: 14 small hooks, 16 small J-hooks, 96 large J-hooks and 22 lures. For a total of 147 hooks. If you extrapolate that by 10, the total would be 1,470!
Keep in mind that all those hooks had lines still attached to them and can cause severe and painful damage to any fish, eel, manta, or turtle that gets wrapped in that line. And it happens all the time.
I was talking with a friend of mine who lives on the island, Anita Wintner, and she works with a turtle rescue group that goes out and rescues entangled turtles. For the year 2024, they were out doing these rescues 270 days out of the 365 that make up a calendar year. That gives you an idea of the large number of entanglements. It’s our goal to get the debris out BEFORE an animal is harmed by it.
Here's a Honu turtle we saw on one of our cleanups. We're so glad we removed the hooks and lines before he came by!
Getting this abandoned fishing gear out of harms way is what ODA is all about.
This is happening all over the Hawaiian Islands. We can’t stop people from fishing, but you can count on us to do our best to minimize the damage that these hooks and lines can cause.
Would you like to be part of this valuable work? Yes? Great! Check out this page to volunteer and this page to donate.
Thank you!
