On Martha's Vineyard they hold a fishing contest every year called The Derby. For a month, fishermen from all over converge on the island in pursuit of striped bass and bluefish, with some bonito and albacore thrown in for good measure. Thousands of fish are caught and entered in the contest, and winning is a very big deal. Win it all and you get a 24-foot boat and a Chevy Silverado to tow it home. Win your category and you pocket $500 and a lot of other goodies. So as you can imagine, the incentive to cheat a bit is sometimes difficult to resist.

How do you cheat? Well, let's say you catch a really big fish during the summer, but The Derby hasn't started yet. What's a fisherman to do? I mean, you can't just let a big fish go to waste can you? Of course not.

Sometime, somewhere, one Stephen Pietruska caught a really big bluefish. Now, bluefish are pretty, but the big ones are not the best eating. Just too much fat. But they are the most common catch in The Derby. You can't really blame Stephen for thinking to himself that it would make a really good Derby fish. And so Stephen entered this particular fish in The Derby last weekend. And guess what; it weighed in as the heaviest bluefish in the whole darn Derby!

Unfortunately for Stephen, The Derby cuts open the really heavy fish, looking for lost lead sinkers that might have somehow wound up in the bellies of the entered fish. When they cut open good ole Stephen's fish, they didn't find any spare tackle, but they did find some ice crystals deep inside the fish.

Stephen had broken Rule No. 27. http://mvderby.com/