He Claimed He Caught a Record-Breaking Fish. Now He’s Being Called a Liar.
He Claimed He Caught a Record-Breaking Fish. Now He’s Being Called a Liar.
Tom Volk’s walleye weighed nearly 17 pounds and stretched more than two-and-a-half feet from nose to tail fin. It was the kind of fish that anglers spend decades seeking, the kind they almost never catch, the kind that ends up mounted in trophy rooms.
“I knew that I had just caught the state-record walleye,” said Mr. Volk, 41, who serves as a city councilman in North Dakota and works in drug prevention for the state government. “It was a dream of mine.”
But Mr. Volk does not have the state record. Instead, he has a written warning from the North Dakota Game and Fish Department. He has a collection of social media posts accusing him of being a fraudster. And he has a boat he is trying to sell because he does not care to go fishing again any time soon.
The dispute about Mr. Volk’s walleye — which became the subject of a criminal investigation, a podcast and dozens of posts on the NodakAngler.com message boards — is an only-in-2019 chapter to a generations-old argument about what qualifies as a fishing record....
...The triumph was short-lived. On NodakAngler.com, the online hub of North Dakota fishing, people questioned if the walleye had been “snagged” or “foul hooked,” meaning hooked somewhere other than the mouth. Intentionally snagging a fish is seen as unsporting. Keeping a foul-hooked fish is also a misdemeanor in North Dakota....
Read it all at the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/us/f ... ating.html
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