CLEVELAND, Ohio - Jacob Runyan of Cleveland and his tournament fishing partner, Chase Cominsky of Hermitage, Pa., had seemed to be the best walleye anglers to ever probe the big waters of Lake Erie for money-winning trophy walleye the last couple of years. That all stopped on Saturday afternoon when the pair weighed a limit of five walleye on a tournament stage perched in the parking lot of Gordon Park in the Cleveland Metroparks.
An elite field of 30 two-angler teams were competing for $30,000 in various prizes on a windy day in the Lake Erie Walleye Trail Championship in Cleveland Harbor.
The string of walleye competition successes for Runyan and Cominsky were legendary, but this time Tournament Director Jason Fischer wanted to put his hands on the dead walleye in their weigh-in bag.
“I knew right away that something was very wrong with those walleye,” said Fischer in a telephone interview.
One of the other tournament regulars said he’d been told by Runyan that the other competitors might as well go home, because Runyan and Cominsky could not be beat.
“When I felt something hard in the belly of their first fish, and their limit of five walleye seemed excessively heavy, at more than 33 pounds, for their length, I called for a fillet knife,” said Fischer, who also works as law enforcement officer in the Cleveland area.
The first slice opened the body cavity, and with almost no prodding, Fisher’s video showed one of the big sinkers falling from the walleye’s body cavity.
“We’ve got weights in the fish!” Fischer announced to the crowd around the weigh-in stage, many with cell phone video cameras. A total of about 10 sinkers were ultimately removed from the five walleye.
It didn’t take much to fire up the weigh-in crowd, many who had suspected Cominsky and Runyan had been cheating regularly to consistently win expensive fishing boats in the Fall Brawl and Walleye Slam fishing derbies in 2021, and tens of thousands of dollars in walleye tournaments.
The two had slipped the heavy 12-ounce egg sinkers in their walleye, and padded them with filleted walleye flesh so that the sinkers wouldn’t bump each other and make noise.
Not wanting chaos, Fischer demanded that Runyan, who was weighing the fish, leave immediately because of threats from others anglers. Cominsky had already locked himself in his truck in the parking lot.
Fisher promptly called police and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
While cheating in fishing tournaments is rare, those who have risked it have found themselves severely fined and even jailed. In tournament fishing circles, a cheating angler becomes a pariah in a sport where competitors rely their reputations and on friendly sponsors for expense money and fishing tackle.
Fischer, the popular tournament director of the Lake Erie WalleyeTrail and the new owner of the Fall Brawl Lake Erie Walleye Derby, posted an apology on the LEWT’s Facebook Page on Saturday evening, and quickly removed Runyan and Cominsky from the standings.
Steve Tyszko and Chris French were named the Ohio State Big Water Walleye Champion after big winds shortened the two-day competition to just Saturday because of gale-force winds in the forecast.
Steve Hendricks and Brian Ulmer captured the 2022 Team of the year. Ryan Buddie and Jason Knopf were Team of the Year runners-up.
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