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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. |
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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.
Fishing, long an escape from the world’s stresses, has taken on more of its trappings. The pastime has been transformed by cellphone videos, social media debates and a growing desire to shame cheaters.
“Anytime somebody claims a new record, it’s common that people will make allegations,” said Robert Timian, North Dakota’s chief game warden, who believes Mr. Volk hooked his walleye illegally and, therefore, wins no record. “Anytime you get into record books, jealousy becomes an issue.”
The story of the Midwest’s most debated walleye began on a Sunday in April when Mr. Volk, an angler since boyhood, heard that fish were biting on a stretch of the Heart River in Mandan, N.D. Along with his wife, his two young children and a friend, Mr. Volk went to the water and started casting his line into the muddy stream.
In the first 90 minutes, his group caught about 10 walleye. His children posed for photos. It was like any other weekend outing. Then Mr. Volk felt a weight on his line.
“I knew it was a big fish as soon as I set the hook,” Mr. Volk said. “It stayed down in the water, even the shallow water, and it was doing head shakes, multiple head shakes.” |
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