Displaying items by tag: paddling in tennessee

Silver weight and thin fishing line tied to a branch for an underwater trotline.  Getty Images via Tennessee Lookout

Traditional Tennessee trot lines pose a fatal collision with river recreation

This story was originally published by Tennessee Lookout.

NASHVILLE — Brandon Archer was canoeing down the Buffalo River with friends over Labor Day weekend three years ago when he jumped out for a swim and drowned.

Archer had become entangled in a trotline, an unmanned fishing line studded with hooks that stretched across the river. The MTSU football player died a day shy of his 22nd birthday.

“When they found him he was under 10 feet of water and they found trotline wrapped around his ankle,” Courtney Archer, Brandon’s mother, told members of the Tennessee Fish and Wildlife Commission this month. “When I saw my son I remember the marks in his ankle from the trotline that was there.”