Fishing is an ancient tradition, used to feed entire civilizations throughout humanity’s time on this planet of ours, but in America, fishing has taken on a life of its own as a competitive sport that combines the patience of chess with the skill of the hunt.
And there is some honor to these competitions as well. Anglers are using every skill at their disposal to outwit fish, and each other, in order to bring home the bacon…so to speak.
So, when someone is caught cheating, there is very little mercy available for them among their fellow competitors.
A pair of fishermen were stripped of their $5,000 tournament win after judges in Ohio discovered that they had put lead weights inside their catch also faced the wrath of a furious crowd on Friday, according to a video of the scene.
Chase Cominsky from Pennsylvania and Jake Runyon from Ohio initially won the Lake Erie Walleye Trail Championship in Cleveland, Ohio’s Gordon Park on Sept. 30. They were awarded a $5,000 prize for their big win.
But the extreme difference in weight spread apparently caused concern, and tournament director Jason Fischer soon decided to gut one of the fish entered by Runyon and Cominsky.
That is when the weight of the matter began to sink in.
Fellow competitors were furious.
The pair recently took down a massive $306,000 prize at another Walleye tournament, and had previously been suspected of adding previously-caught fish to their tournament cache – leading many competitors to wonder if they should be banned from sport-fishing entirely.
