Sunday, June 08, 2008
Fishing tourney cheaters never win
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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With the hefty paydays at stake in bass tournaments these days, it's no surprise that some folks resort to sneakiness to try to tip the scales in their favor.
Such seemed the case a few weeks back when a bass angler fishing on Claytor Lake in preparation for a big weekend tournament made an interesting discovery.
In a cove he found a bass tethered to the bank.
Interestingly, a similar scenario played out last year before a tournament at Claytor.
In that case the angler contacted the event's director, who staked out the tethered bass come tournament day.
He didn't have to wait long before a boat showed up, in it two fishermen who were known for consistently high finishes in local tournaments.
As the anglers retrieved their pre-caught fish, the tournament official took pictures. But the suspected cheaters spotted him and bolted. As in, they roared back to the boat ramp, loaded their boat on the trailer and hit the highway without weighing their catch.
Because the anglers didn't try to weigh in the fish, they couldn't be criminally charged with anything.
Tournament officials, as well as plenty of fishermen who'd lost to the tandem through the years, were frustrated. But it didn't really matter in the long run.
Everyone knows who they are -- and gleefully posted their names on bass fishing-related Internet message boards. Their days of tournament fishing around these parts are over.
Lessons from that incident are still fresh in the minds of local bass anglers and tournament officials, so this time they were more careful and got the law involved early on.
Conservation police officers Roland Cox and Jeff Pease were called to the lake. But then the angler who found the bass couldn't relocate it.
Uh oh.
But after some further looking Cox and Pease were able to find several tethered fish. They clipped the fins and returned them to the water.
At dark and early tournament morning, Cox and officer Wes Billings were in the bushes nearby.
Cox said he was prepared for a long day of surveillance.
"I had even packed a lunch," he said.
He didn't need it.
About 7:40 a.m. a boat idled into the cove.
The occupants made sure no other boats were in the area before they retrieved their bass. Two had died overnight. The others went in the livewell.
Cox and Billings got everything on video.
The fishermen went on their way.
And the next phase of the operation went into motion.
Billings and Cox retrieved the two dead bass from the lake, and also collected the string the men had discarded.
Next, the men ran the boat registration numbers and determined it was registered to a man from Dickenson County. At the DGIF's public ramp at Hidden Valley, the officers found the man's truck. They also found several other vehicles from Dickenson County, which led them to believe that a club from the county was holding a tournament at the lake.
The men headed out on the water, checking boats and fishermen, and eventually confirmed that their theory was right.
When the club started its tournament weigh-in, Cox and Billings were there, camera rolling.
After the men weighed their 10-bass catch, Billings and Cox approached them and asked about the tethered bass.
Don't you just wish you could see the look on those guys' faces?
The men came clean.
Here's the really wild thing. This tournament was for bragging rights only. No money. Not even trophies. Which, at least from a legal standpoint, was a good thing for the tethered bass boys.
Instead of facing potential felony charges, all these guys got were citations for littering and exceeding their bag limit. (In addition to the two dead bass in the lake, they had another bass in their boat's livewell.)
But, like those guys at last year's tournament found out, the stakes of getting caught cheating are much higher than simply facing a fine.
Cox said the president of that Dickenson County bass club recently told him that the anglers have been booted from the group.
Think other clubs are lining up to recruit them? Hardly.
The team tournament format is appealing for many reasons, chief among them the fact that it allows friends to spend time fishing together, which is what fishing is really about.
The downside is that it's tougher to police fishermen whose intentions are less than honorable.
It's hard not to wonder how many cheaters might be getting away with this kind of thing.
Probably not as many as some might think.
The prizes and the glory may be alluring. But most tournament anglers are in it for the love of the sport.
They know that if they cheat, they'll probably get caught. Eventually. And then they'll be done.
And that's hardly worth risking. For any prize.
