The tournament that caused Andrew Cameron to quit competitive fishing was one that he directed. Cameron and his buddies put together a national fishing trail called the Kayak Bass Series, a string of eight or so annual events that each drew several dozen tournament anglers to face off for thousands of dollars in prize money. Cameron and the other organizers had opted to use an app called iAngler for the tournament, which allows participants to catch a fish, take a photo of it on a bump board (the fishing equivalent of a metal shoe sizer), and release it back into the water.
The series had been going swimmingly until a scandal all but ruined the sport for Cameron.
“The one thing that killed it for me was the simple fact that we caught a cheater, and it ended up being a pretty big deal,” he told The Daily Beast. Andrew Shepherd, an angler on an unbelievable winning streak, had tampered with his bump board by cutting out a portion near the base and gluing it back together. The doctored board fooled the app into inflating the length of his catches and made it so he could double count fish by subsequently photographing them on a normal board. After his ruse was detected, he returned $3,000 to the Kayak Bass Series.
