Thousands of pieces of fishing gear removed from coastal NC waters over past decade

Protecting our state’s coastal waters is an ongoing effort, and one nonprofit recently hit a major milestone in that endeavor.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation marked 10 years of working with commercial fishing crews to find and remove thousands of pieces of lost fishing gear from the water.

Matt Littleton and Carson Whetherington spend their mornings in Swansboro searching for bouys -- but these crab pots aren't providing their next meal; they're looking to pull lost and forgotten gear from the water.

"The areas we’re working, continuously we’re seeing lost pots or leftover or one that might have gotten moved around from a storm. In this area we’re running up on just pots that are derelict, debris that’s been discarded somewhere or it’s been hit by a boat or hit by a prop because it’s been in the water for so long," says Littleton, with Friendly City Fishing Charters.

“He loved, we love it," he says. "You know, I work on the water, so being able to have a hand in keeping it clean is everything to me.”

For the Coastal Federation, this program is important on a number of fronts.

To keep coastal waters clean, the coastal federation has partnered alongside the division of marine fisheries marine patrol to find and remove the lost gear since 2014.

"We’ve retrieved about 20,000 crab pots since the program began," he says.

The Federation says that number doesn’t include what Marine Patrol has found.

The clean-up efforts take place during the blue crab closure each year.

“Each year they close the crab potting season for a couple of weeks in January up in the northern and central part of the coast, and in March in the southern part of the coast," he says.

More than 2,000 lost crab pots were cleaned up in January and over 400 were collected in March.

The Coastal Federation’s lost fishing gear recovery program is supported by the North Carolina commercial fishing license resource fund.