Earlier this year, we reported on a cheating incident on Lake Powell (see the original story here). Two anglers, Robert Dennett and Kamron Wootton, brought fish to the scales the first day of a two day fishing tournament in October of 2018 that did not look like any of the bass weighed in that day and were in very poor shape. The fish were kept and The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources called out a biologist and the next day a plain-clothes officer was at the weigh-in.
“Some of the largemouth bass they’d turned in had little heads and fatter bodies, indicating a different diet than the fish at Lake Powell, which were more lean,” DWR Lt. Paul Washburn said. “The fish also had red fins, which indicated they had undergone some stress.”
They were questioned at the second day weigh-in by a DWR officer, and a lengthy investigation was launched. Wootton all but admitted they had done something wrong to the investigator, while Bennett smugly denied any wrongdoing. They were charged in March at the Kane County 6th District Court with bribery or threat to influence a contest, a third-degree felony; unlawful release of wildlife, a class A misdemeanor; and unlawful captivity of protected wildlife, a class B misdemeanor.
During the course of the investigation, Utah DWR officers were contacted by another tournament organization in Utah, the UBTT and their tournament director Allen Bratton. One of Bratton’s anglers had seen these two men at Quail Creek Reservoir the Thursday evening before the Powell event, doing “something suspicious in the shallows just before dark.”
As it turns out anglers must sign in and sign out when leaving that body of water, and the investigators found that Dennett’s boat had checked in to that body of water the Thursday afternoon before the two-day event on Powell, some 140 miles away.