GMO Rainbow trout Frankenfish...
Posted on 10/04/2022 11:29:05 AM PDT by Red Badger
The walleye that swim in the cold, murky depths of Lake Erie are the waters’ apex predator, sleek torpedoes of teeth that dine on shad, minnow and any other fish smaller than themselves. They do not, as far as marine science has determined, dine on lead pellets the size of golf balls or precisely-trimmed fillets of other walleye. So when Jason Fischer, director of the Lake Erie Walleye Trail tournament series, pulled handfuls of lead sinkers and fillets from the bellies of some prize-winning fish, he knew he had a hell of a problem in his hands.
There’s nibble-around-the-edges, cut-the-corners cheating, like going five miles an hour over the speed limit or faking sick to get out of work. This is a story about the other kind: whole-hog, all-in cheating where plausible deniability doesn’t exist. It begins in Cleveland’s Gordon Park, on the shores of Lake Erie, where the Lake Erie Walleye Trail was wrapping up its championship event on Saturday.
Fischer – yes, that’s his real surname – was looking forward to the end of a long tournament season, working his way through the catches of the 30 elite two-angler teams. He weighed the fish of angler after angler, picking up their fish and setting them on a scale. Late in the proceedings, the anglers of boat No. 12, Chase Cominsky and Jake Runyan, brought their five-fish catch up for weighing. They needed to beat 16.89 total pounds to claim Team of the Year honors and $30,000 in various prizes.
Their catch’s weight: 33.91 pounds.
The silence that greeted Fischer’s announcement was the first sign that something was very much amiss. No applause, no cheers, just silence. And then the muttering started.
“Damn,” one man said in disbelief, “thirty-three?”
(Excerpt) Read more at sports.yahoo.com ...
Yahoo News covers a scandal in a fishing competition yet doesn’t print a word about the laptop.
GMO Rainbow trout Frankenfish...
That’s OLD history. Like Erie is beautiful now.
*** After all, who hasn’t wanted to see cheaters brought to justice in real time?***
This line in the article seems to fit your post. Would that Biden and Harris and their co cheaters were caught in the same red-handed fashion, and prosecuted. No such luck.
This is likely what caught the guys. There are long standing charts that equate length and girth of fish to weight. Since the fish were dead at weigh in, the judges were able to dissect the fish to suggest/conclude fraud.
I agree Lake Erie is much nicer than it once was. When we were kids it was considered a dead lake. Reductions in industrial effluent and the action of zebra mussels have both helped to improve clarity. There are still sediments containing heavy metals. I wouldn’t eat large fish or bottom feeders from Lake Erie on a regular basis.
Still happens. I know of instances where competitors fished the lake the entire week before the tournament and put their biggest fish in a fish pen at some remote place on the lake. On tournament day they went back to retrieve those fish. They were small local tournaments though. But you’re right, it is harder when you have to bring in live fish.
My neighbor competes in a lot of these. He said these guys could be in a lot of trouble as they’ve “won” a lot of money and loot in other tournaments. As much as $300,000 and two boats…
If you are a judge handling and weighing 16 inch walleye all day and suddenly you you have three that are twice as heavy as anything you’ve handled then alarm bells should be going off. Which, as you said, is almost certainly how these guys got caught. They got greedy and used too much weight.
walleye punks!
I am a CPA. I have seen all kinds of stuff in my profession. I can tell if someone is dishonest by the looks in their eyes, etc. These two dudes look the part.
Don’t ever go to a lawyer’s convention......................you’ll go blind................
No different than presidential ballot stuffing. Where is the National outrage over that?
That cheat ripped Americans off Trillions of dollars in market loss and 401k, massive tax increases, supply shortages, massive fuel and energy costs. Throw in 87 thousand IRS agents with a deep state FBI running outside the bounds of Our Civil rights.
Yep, cheating is bad in a fishing tournament. The outrage is real. Why not the same outrage regarding election integrity. That failure costs beyond imagination that will last generations.
Yeah I’ve heard of people precatching fish and using holding containers.
That one’s been around for a long time.
Harder to do in saltwater tournaments.....the ones I’ve been in really are under the honor system.
There’s got to be more to this.
To cheat by so much, using a technique so easy to catch and prove...
I hope soneon3 does some more digging.
I bet they have done it so many times before they got sloppy this time and got caught.....................................
Wow, caught cheating like this. How do you face your kids?
A guy like that killed my best friend's mom 35 years ago in a tournament. Except he was going way faster than 5 over. Just had to get to them big fishies faster than everyone else.
Carl Hiaason wrote an hysterical book about cheating in bass tourneys: Double Whammy. The cheaters caught the fish a day or two before the tournaments and kept them on stringers or in fish baskets hidden in remote areas. It was very entertaining reading.
A metal detector scan at weigh in might prove insightful.
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