Stop me if you heard this one before… man catches “big fish,” fish seems too good to be true, fish is stuffed with weight… sound familiar?
Of course, many of remember the infamous walleye tournament cheaters who got busted stuffing their “tournament winning” fish with lead weights in 2022. But this instance in Kansas didn’t involved a tournament scandal… it involved a potential state record.
Back in April of 2023, Bobby Parkhurst caught a white crappie weighing 4.07 pounds and measuring 18 inches in length, good enough for the Kansas state record. However, the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks (KDWP) removed the catch from the record books this past November… and now we know why.
According to KSNT, an investigation into the fish revealed a pair of steel ball bearings were inside the fish, adding enough weight to give the man the state record.
At the time Parkhurst said:
“They didn’t tell me anything. I don’t understand why they’re doing this to me.
I did it the whole way they wanted me to do it. I went through the procedures, I wrote down what I caught it on, I did everything they wanted me to do by the book.
I did everything I was supposed to do. Their biologists looked at it more than once.”
KDWP spokeswoman Nadia Marji says the department received a “tip from an eyewitness who claimed the fish had been initially weighed in at 3.73 pounds.”
They took the fish to the local zoo for an x-ray, and sure, enough… steel weights inside:
“To preserve the integrity of KDWP’s state record program, KDWP Game Wardens met with the angler who voluntarily presented his fish for re-examination.
When staff used a handheld metal detector to scan the fish, the device detected the presence of metal.”
The amount of work that goes into maintaining the integrity of state record fish is rather impressive. If you think you can pull a fast one on your local fish and game department… think again.
And what’s more, the man may be looking at fraud charges for falsifying information, although I would imagine that most DAs would decline to pursue something like this. But, we’ll see…
The Shawnee County District Attorney’s Office launch an investigation into the matter and press charges in the event that enough evidence exists to do so.
