You've heard stories of people who won huge lottery prizes only to have the money ruin their lives? Wait ‘til you read about Arkansas resident Rodney Ply.
He caught a huge striped bass (68 pounds) at Bull Shoals Lake on February 18, 2013.
Ply hooked the beast using a lure of his own design (he calls it a Bass Tricker; it's basically a spinnerbait/umbrella rig).
"I cast toward the shoreline and all of a sudden I had one of the hardest hits I've ever had in my life," he told Bassmaster magazine.
Ply had hooked a fish that he later discovered would earn him two rewards — $100,000 from Arkansas for landing the state-record striper and $1 million from hook-maker Mustad for using one of its hooks to catch and land a world record. Weeks before he caught the striper, Ply had signed up in Mustad's "Hook-a-Million" contest.
But he has received no prize money and during July his attorneys sued the International Game Fish Association, the official keeper of world fishing records.
The problem with the striper earning an Arkansas award of $100,000 was that state rules indicate a fish must be weighed on certified scales and someone from Arkansas Game and Fish or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has to witness the weight.
Ply said he and his friends called multiple times to get Arkansas Game and Fish to come to them and went through two counties trying to find a scale big enough to weigh the fish.
The striper finally was weighed in front of witnesses -- but not people from the specified agencies. So the state wouldn't give him credit, even though the marina scale apparently was certified after the fact as accurate and Arkansas recently had certified other records under the same, similar or sketchier circumstances.
Ply also submitted the striper to IGFA, official keeper of fishing world records. Interestingly, IGFA had no problem with the weight or the scales -- but the organization wanted to evaluate the lure.
The IGFA rules committee decided to call Ply's rig a "spreader-bar arrangement," and said it was an illegal lure — even though it wasn't used in saltwater (where spreader bars usually are employed), Ply cast the lure and retrieved it himself, it wasn't being trolled, and IGFA rules don't ban two-hook rigs.
"Umbrella rigs are considered a spread-bar arrangement," said IGFA world-record coordinator Jack Vitek.
"My lure didn't inhibit the fight of the fish or give me an unfair advantage in landing it," Ply said. "The lure is nothing more than a spinnerbait using two hooks and weighed 1.4 ounces."
Ply said he never dreamed he'd catch a world-record fish.
"But the way it's turned out has been real disheartening," he said. "I caught the record striped bass, and it should be in the record books. The money is life-changing for me and my family, too, but money's not everything in life."
The former world-record striped bass weighed 64 1/2 pounds.
"Mr. Ply is your average hard-working decorated veteran who was invited to compete in a competition and as an avid angler he was excited about fulfilling any fisherman's dream, which is to catch a world-record fish," said attorney Michael Glasser, who along with partner Eric Rudenberg will represent Ply. "He followed all the rules and he was blessed and gifted enough to succeed at something that everyone dreams of and all he wants is what was promised to him."
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