Originally published at: Fishing cheats exposed, along with the lead weights they stuffed in their catches | Boing Boing
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I love the “call the cops!” And “he should go to jail.” The maniacal outrage.
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I would be, er, reluctant, to provide life insurance at standard rates if these guys attempt to continue practicing a relatively solitary hobby adjacent to large bodies of water.
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So ‘splain this to like a five year old…? this is clearly “cheating” in terms of competitive fishing. and it involves lead weights ("hey my ol’ da used lead weight ‘sinkers’ when he was troll fish’n all the time") and (other) fish filets? the caught fish ate the other fish filets which contain lead weights and that makes them too easy to catch (somehow)? i blame myself for not seeing the hooks for the sinkers.
These are adults? Oh yeah, they are…
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The competition is judged by weight of the catch. They’re cramming in lead weights and fish parts from other fish to make their catch seem bigger than it was
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ah thank you! i had stupidly the wrong end of the competition. (the getting the catch bit, not the judge the catch bit)
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Why the extra filet? Maybe it helps hide the round weights during an external inspection??
Two things:
- The Tournament Director is called Jason Fischer
- It took me a while to realise that that was his title, as my brain was immediately thinking “Y’know, I don’t think he was elected to the Dáil.”
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Fortunately, with any given species of fish, measuring length and girth will provide a rough approximation of likely weight. Something like a chunk of lead will yield outlier weight. Also, I imagine a veteran at the scales will notice anything out of the ordinary.
The funny thing about the cheats is their greed. The amount of lead sinkers in some of those fish obviously must have flagged them at the scales.
It’s a good thing that a veteran bass fisherman was at the scales: “When is only time a fisherman is telling the truth? It’s when he’s calling another fisherman a liar.” An old commercial fisherman joke.
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First prize is $30,000 dollars.
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From the size of those lead weights, they’d have to make the fish feel lumpy if you squeezed it at all?!
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Also, it would have thrown off the weight balance of the fish. Crazy.
I guess the answer is don’t expect too much of guys dumb enough to cheat.
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The new york times, in its articles links to several similar incidents,
(all paywalled)
Sometime, the anglers precatch their prize winning fish. In the Utah case, the cheaters tried to substitute a species not known to thrive in the contest area.
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And their team made over $500k last year in prizes.
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All of that angst and not a single one of those anglers could come up with a “something’s fishy” to belt out for the record?.. I’m disappointed.
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I watched some bass fishing on ESPN2 a few months back. In that competition each fisherman got to bring in 5 bass and they competed on total weight. If you had your 5 and then caught a heavier one, you’d release your lightest.
Of course in these rules you do your utmost to keep the fish alive, you have a live tank in your boat, and there are penalties if a fish dies. Stuffing them with lead weights or filets of other fish would be problematic in this regard.
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The amount of money at stake makes that a little more understandable. We’re talking about a single known fraud of tens of thousands of dollars and it calls into question hundreds of thousands of dollars in previously awarded prizes. That’s before you get into the secondary income streams related to these tournaments. Sport fishing in the western basin is a large tourism industry and the ability to pass yourself off as a particularly good captain can ensure a lot of contracts.
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…or “the jig’s up”?
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