Competitive Bass Fishing Cheaters (2014)

In general, yes, you can absolutely put strong enough line on that will let you haul a fish straight out of the water dangling from it. It you fish for small fish (perch, bluegill, etc.), that's basically what you do every time. They are small enough that even the lightest line will still hold them.

The challenge, though, is that the stronger the line is, the more visible it is to the fish, and the less finesse you have when fishing with it. More visible line can spook fish and get you fewer bites. And a thicker, stiffer line can make it harder for you to work the lure in a realistic way that entices fish to bite.

So you're always making the trade-off where lighter line means more bites but a greater risk of not landing the fish if it breaks the line. Stronger lines mean fewer bites but if you get a hookset, you can probably land the fish.

There are other complications too: fish aren't the only thing in the water. Stronger line can help you not lose lures if it gets tangled on branches or other obstructions.

On the other hand, lighter line is more fun to fish with. You feel what the fish is doing much more clearly and the fight is more interactive. Catching a small fish using a big stiff fishing rod with heavy line feels like listening to music with earplugs in. You lose a lot of the experience.

Also, there are different kinds of line: monofilament, fluorocarbon, braid. And you don't have to use the same kind of line for the whole length. Sometimes it makes sense to have a leader (a short section of line at the end) that's lighter or heavier than your main line.

One of the delights of fishing is that it's an endless problem-solving exercise in gear optimization.

> By far, the most common way people cheat is to store a fish basket or pet taxi under a dock, filled with lunkers they’d caught before the event, and then retrieve the fish while they were supposed to be out fishing. A variation on this would be to attach a string to a stump in the water and hook various fish to the string. This way allows fishermen to retrieve the fish while faking that they actually caught them, just in case they were paired up in the boat with a competitor. There was the story that Ray Scott told me about a man who showed up for a tournament wearing a full-length raincoat even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky — his partner later discovered the man had a string of bass draped around his neck. There was the guy in the U.K. who last year won a bass fishing tournament with a 13-pounder, only to have the second-place finisher recognize the giant bass from a recent trip he had taken to the local aquarium with his daughter. They called the aquarium and, sure enough, it was missing a big bass. People have been caught buying fish off of noncompetitors on the lake during an event, or sharing fish between colluding teams.

Article doesn't mention it, but seems like you could easily brute force it - if the prize money is big enough you simply have your friend scuba dive in the lake with a closed system and in possession of a huge pre-caught bass. Then you meet at a predetermined spot in the lake where your friend attaches the fish to your hook and you reel it in. Then you split the prize later. This would only work on big lakes though or there would be witnesses of a scuba diver exiting the lake at some point.

The prize we were competing for was a baseball cap.

At one point when a friend suggested it, I passed and said "look dude, I can get paid for someone yelling at me, and have just as much fun." It's a stupid video game, zero stakes, but those games in particular seem to just turn people into assholes.