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I first parsed "competitive bass fishing cheaters" as cheaters who competed with each other for the best technique.
Then I realised that was silly -- they are cheating to beat everyone. A classic "garden path" sentence.
Then I realised that both interpretations are correct.
For the other lucky 9,999: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
Wow thank you. Been looking for a definition of these kinds of sentences for a long time!
I misread that as "garden path sentience" and imagined that you were a paved walkway who had gained the power of self-reflection.
Really miss Grantland, that was some of my favorite content on the internet at the time. Shame it got shut down the way it did.
Haven't found something that replaces the exact itch it scratched for me at the time. Some good Substacks are the closest.
longform stuff on defector (the writer-owned site built from the ashes of deadspin) hits a lot of the same notes for me
There was a recent case involving cheating at a walleye fishing tournament:
https://www.outdoorlife.com/fishing/walleye-anglers-sentence...
Aw, one of my first project in web development was a fishing tournament platform so for some odd reason that's dear to my heart (though I care little for the actual thing). Probably the best intro you can have to "never trust user input".
SEEKING WORK | Any pleasant body of water | Remote working not possible
Experienced seabass seeking freelance position. Open to partners for fishy business at tournaments. Very handsome and sure to impress any tournament judge. (Note: only accepting contracts on a 'paid relocation back to water' basis).
Discussed (just a bit) at the time:
The Weight of Guilt: Competitive bass fishing cheaters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8694091 - Dec 2014 (1 comment)
You don’t just pull the fish in with all your might. That’s a sure way to break your line and let the fish escape.
How much stronger would fishing line have to be before you could brute force 95% of fish in?
This is a complicated question.
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.
Just to add on a bit more, there is a saying (more among fly fisherman), "the tug is the drug". Some people get a thrill knowing they are at the limit of their gear and find that heightened sense of excitement to be pleasurable, not knowing what is going to happen. I imagine it is like gamblers watching roulette.
This is also why some guys like to pike fish on ultralight gear.
Not just the line, but the rod too. As a kid, we always thought we landed a "big one" by the way the poles would bend. It wasn't until I was older that my dad told me about kids poles made that way just to increase the excitement. Just the slightest nibble on the bait would cause the pole to bend significantly.
I basically only fish using ultralight gear and it has that same property. A little palm-sized bluegill bends the rod like I hooked a shark. It's fun.
Yup, I once worked in a 18lb freshwater drum on 6lb rated line. Took me about 1/2 hour. Was in a dam spillway with some noticeable current. Both the fish and I was worn out. And the poor dude was thrown back in, they aren't really very eatable.
That's a life-long memory right there.
Now I'm imagining a heavy line that is actually multiple parallel strands, somehow treated so that in air they will curl and stick together, but when submerged they separate into multiple filaments that are harder for fish to see. (Converging, of course, onto the hook.)
'Course, then they'll probably snag all the time.
There's an easier solution: Make transparent line with a refractive index as close to water's as you can get. That's what fluorocarbon line is, as I understand it.
It has some downsides, though: it's a little stiffer and thus harder to tie knots in. It's less resistant to abrasion (being dragged over rocks, etc.). But it mostly disappears in water.
I appreciate the detailed answer but that wasn't really my question. I wanted to know, in regards to material science, how much stronger we would have to make a regular fishing line of typical diameter using a future material, not how big a line we would have to use. Would it have to be twice as strong? Ten times as strong?
They definitely make line that is strong enough but it's thicker and fish that spot it are hesitant to take the bait. So there's a balance: strong enough not to lose fish but thin enough to gain an edge over the other competitors.
I was thinking about designing a line that thickened and strengthened in response to the tension of reeling, but that I realized a negative poisson ratio was the opposite of what I wanted.
Also the hook still has to hold
So how does the cheat work?
> Whenever I told friends of mine I was working on a story about cheating at bass fishing, they always asked the same thing: How in the world do you cheat at bass fishing? Let me count the ways, I’d tell them.
> 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.
There was a video[1] going around about a year ago of some guys who cheated in a fishing tournament by stuffing weights inside their fish. Wild what people are willing to do!
> his partner later discovered the man had a string of bass draped around his neck
Incredible. I guess you have to hope the other person catches early so they don’t notice the smell!
So basically the same as how people do hackathons. :-)
In a recent scandal, salmon fillets wrapped around lead weights shoven down the fish's troats was also used to cheat.
Pre-caught fish that the fisher pretends to catch somehow (fish tethered to some underwater anchor, etc).
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.
Wouldn't people notice you catching a dead fish? Or are you saying to do this with a live one?
Probably going need to recommend a rebreather setup and pressurized submersible to retreat to until after the tournament. SCUBA is going to have too many bubbles that reveal your position.
On King of the Hill, Dale used a frozen fish he brought with him: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz4SgWPAJQE
I’m pretty sure there is a Carl Hiaasen novel that deals with this.
Had no idea Grantland was still around
Count Dankula (yes, Nazi pug guy) did a good mini-doc on one of the worst offenders. Got me interested, and wow, this goes a lot deeper than I thought. Of course every sport has cheaters, but some don't seem to be as egregious.
The lesson here is that, even when the stakes are small, human beings are still human beings, with all that that entails.
I was recently on a cruise. There was a daily trivia game on days when we were at sea. It got quite cutthroat, to the point where some passengers had to be reprimanded for abusing the crew. I was so appalled I stopped participating.
The prize we were competing for was a baseball cap.
It's crazy to me how competitive some people get, and how they justify their behavior to themselves. There is a parent of a kid in a group with my kids, and they started shouting obscenities at a judge who they disagreed with. I can't imagine behaving that way at all, let alone in front of my children. I don't know how they can expect their
I think this phenomenon is known as "the lesser the juice, the tighter the squeeze".
It's also what makes listing something as free-to-take on something like craigslist more of a headache than putting a small price on it.
My neighbourhood used to put on an Easter egg hunt for the kids. Parents donate a bunch of chocolate eggs and other volunteers spread them around a large park.
Unfortunately this event had to be cancelled because some parent were running around with their kids in their arms to pick up the most eggs, others were shoving 4 year old kids, other yet were watching 3 year olds waddle in their oversized snow suit to an egg excitedly, but would run up and take the egg.
I never imagined that it would go that badly.
Mind you, we did attempt several years with different rules and communications that parents aren’t to be involved and it didn’t help.
This is why I refuse to play Overcooked or Overcooked 2 ever again. Every time I've played, it ends with me being yelled at because I'm not very good at it, and getting blamed for getting a one star.
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.
I'll always remember this comment re: Overcooked 2:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31618955#31624381
> If you put your heart in it, you learn to communicate effectively under pressure (especially when trying to conquer those 4th stars), tolerate/move-on from each other's mistakes, and control your temper around each other.
I hate that you had a bad experience with it. I love that game. Laughing at each others blunders is what makes it entertaining.
Overcooked is about playing and interacting with friends... the game quest is secondary. If the game quest comes first, then you probably don't actually want to play with those friends.
haha, yeah.
It's so weird -- I first played this in the context of coworkers during a week-long hackathon event, and we played Overcooked to blow off steam. It was a ton of fun.
Later, I was looking for good multiplayer games to play as a family, and with those fond memories I picked up Overcooked for the Switch. Boy, was that a mistake. My kids normally get along fine, but this brought out every bad tendency they had for bad cooperation and blame. Never again. The kids still vividly remember that and refuse to play that one together ever again.
I'm sorry you're getting yelled at, Overcooked is supposed to be fun. That game brings out who people are though, so it's a good proxy for how people will behave in other situations. If someone starts yelling at you and blaming you for failing, that's on them, not you. I'd use that to find someone who doesn't yell and blame you and become all shitty towards you, rather than not playing the game again.