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
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
, 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.