Quote Originally Posted by Crappiebeagle View Post
I have fished several tournaments and pondered fishing the one this happened at. In MHO some thing ain't right. They weighed 9 fish and still had another in the live well!!! This is after the officials supposedly removed the small cull 8th fish and checked to see if that left them with 7 to weigh in. When I tourney fish I only want 7 in the box 8 at the most. If you can't keep those alive with the products that are on the market, you aught not fish tournaments. If you want to meat fish and keep a bunch do it while your prefishing for the tournament. That team should never had made it to the scales when they showed up to get checked at the weigh in line. Would of saved a lot of embarrassment for everyone envolved. Gonna be a little hard to edit that incident out of a TV show
First of all I was there. The ACT Officials counted and checked their fish twice and removed the 8th fish from their livewell. At that time there were only 7 fish in the livewell. The Top 10 boats were all parked together on the side. Since they were leading they were weighted last. I stood beside the boat when they took the fish out of the livewell ( within 6ft). I never actually counted the fish as they took them out but after awhile I thought there was too many put in the bag. I have seen a few tournament fish and knew they did not over a 2# average. The live video shows what looks like a tagged fish being put back in the livewell, but it was not it was a floating air hose that caught on the side of the fish. All the fish were removed from the livewell. They should have known they had more than 7 fish in the bag. But 'heat of the moment"? When they weighed almost 15# I said no way. Matt Morgan took the bag of right away to the release tank and told the operator " don't dump this bag, hang it up, I'll will be right back". While all the rest of the hoopla was going on stage, he counted the fish and found 9 fish were in the bag. When the anglers were heading to the Polygraph he stopped them and told them they were DQ because they weighted too many fish. If you watch the live feed you can count the fish. The video was reviewed and the DQ held. The anglers have issued a letter and it is on ACT facebook page. The ACT Officials handeled it in the Best way possible at that time. This is an unfortunate mistake by the anglers. How the extra fish got in the livewell, I have No idea. All the videos have been reviewed even the one using the drone flying over the parking lot. No answers.Everyone involved would like to know. Only thing I know the fish were spawning!