I did some poking around after this article, there’s an interview with the director where he states that’s exactly what made him cut them open. Clearly dead fish (they are most often kept live so they can be released if you catch larger), with lumps that were obvious to the touch in them.
Also apparently you have to take polygraph tests to participate and they appear to take the results seriously despite their unreliability.
I’ve heard of situations where frozen fish were found by judges. Sometimes prize money is too tempting of a lure for amoral anglers.
Looks like they are going to start waving a metal detector over these catches. I mean man, those were some big weights. I am not even sure what you would normally use them for, probably something for the ocean or nets.
Band name!
Weighing down cheaters before you throw them in the lake. /S
Into the lake!
Into the lake!
With weights tied to their feet!
Carl Hiaasen’s Double Whammy (1987) is a fantastic darkly humorous thriller about cheating in the world of Bass fishing.
Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat contains a very amusing scene about trophy fish displayed in a pub.
Presumably, they’ve been doing this for a long time. Long enough that they’re not the only ones. After all, others competing against “fish + extra weights” also need to add extra weights just to stay even. This inevitably leads to more and more weights being added until it’s simply absurd. That’s what sounds like happened here.
Here’s a much better explanation of how it’s completely expected and the logical conclusion.
https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1576585331964776448?s=20&t=OkNjeuElFtJcpzsrdw0e1A
I used to broadcast 3 or 4 of these every summer … yeah, you don’t fuck around. The money is big, the value to the host community is big, participants have huge $$ invested, a cheating scandal could ruin so much. Guarantee these guys will have their faces posted at competitions just like the photos behind the cashier of people who wrote bad cheques.
Be around this a little and you’ll understand why the outrage.
Oh definitely. These guys have been turning up everywhere for days now. They’re all over my IG feed (since it’s mostly fishing related) and people are furious they tried and glad they got caught. I’ll be amazed if they ever end up in a tournament again.
and they fell for it hook, line and sinker.
What a world we live in where people make this kind of money angling.
Crowd got quite rowdy. Reminded me of this:
Not necessarily. As noted above, the weighed fish are kept in a live well and only brought out for weighing. Dead fish often get penalized and raise flags. It’s very tough to keep fish with a bunch of weights in their stomachs alive. If anything, I would guess these guys had been doing the stuff-fish-with-fish-parts thing for a while, but got greedy and added the weights. That’s how they got busted.
Very clever: Honey, I gotta go to my AA meeting tonight.
You can’t do this in normal, recreational fishing though. It’s called “culling” and it’s prohibited in most areas. Once you put a fish on a stringer or in your live well it counts towards your daily bag limit and you can get fined if a ranger catches you releasing a smaller fish for a bigger one.
Too bad Leadbelly is already taken!
Looks like charges may be coming.
ODNR wildlife officers responded to the Lake Erie Walleye Tournament on Friday, September 30, 2022 after being contacted by tournament organizers. Officers collected evidence and are preparing a report for the Cuyahoga County Prosecutors Office.
I like that Google tracks me, it puts stories in my feed that relate to stuff I’ve been reading or talking about outloud.
The guy sums it up at the end, if it wasn’t for greed the guy would have got away with it and the way he justified the cheating makes him an excellent candidate for the rebublicans.
