Fisherman Caught Staging Kayak Pictures in a Bass Boat Banned from Tournaments for Cheating

The tight-knit community of kayak tournament anglers is abuzz with a cheating scandal involving a competitor, a staged kayak seat, and some fraudulent fish pictures. According to allegations confirmed Monday by a tournament director, the competitor, Jacob Housman, cheated in an online kayak tournament this summer by staging fish pictures with a cutout of a kayak he’d put on a powerboat.

New York Kayak Bass Fishing tournament director John Tammaro confirmed with Outdoor Life Monday that the allegations are true, and that Housman confessed to cheating in a direct message he sent Tammaro via Facebook. Tammaro says Housman also paid back the $200 he won for placing first in the tournament.

“That all happened,” Tammaro says. “He knew what he was doing. He’d set it up and submitted the pictures from an area where this all could have been believable.”

The cheating allegations were first made public by Adam Milstead, a YouTuber and kayak tournament angler who outed Housman in a video he posted over the weekend.

“This guy [was using] a cutout on his boat of a kayak, so that he could submit fish to the kayak tournament while fishing out of a bass boat,” Milstead explains in the roughly 12-minute video, which Tammaro says is entirely accurate.

The allegations in Milstead’s video date back to an online, month-long tournament organized by NYKBF in June — a tournament that Housman won. In these online tourneys, competitors have a month to catch the five biggest fish they can from public waters, and then upload photographs of their catches via the TourneyX platform. The total inches of bass caught and recorded are added up at the end of the month, at which point the winners are declared. 

Although there are additional regulations to follow under the KBF’s Catch-Photo-and-Release format, one of the most obvious rules in these kayak tournaments is that all fish have to be caught from a kayak. (Fish caught from single canoe and certain types of stand-up paddle boards were also fair game in this particular event.) Housman violated this key rule by submitting pictures of fish that he caught on a powerboat but then staged using the kayak cutout.

Tammaro says he was first tipped off by a tournament official with Pennsylvania Bass Nation, which hosts its own kayak tournament trail. That official had disqualified Housman from a tournament on the Susquehanna River in August after Housman was repeatedly caught fishing in a closed area. Curious if Housman had cheated in other tournaments, the official dug into Housman’s Instagram profile, along with his entries from the NYKBF’s June tournament, where he found evidence of a staged photo.

“[This individual] saw a fish — a selfie — that Jacob had taken and put on his Instagram. And when he saw that fish he [thought] it was oddly familiar to the fish that he submitted for the New York KBF,” Milstead explains in his video. “And so, when you compare both of the fish — and this is what I did … You can see all of the similarities. You know that’s the same fish. Plain and simple.”

Tammaro says that after seeing these photos side-by-side, NYKBF’s board of directors agreed that Housman had cheated. They were debating whether to disqualify the single smallmouth or to ban the angler entirely when additional evidence came to light.

“Two nights ago, I think it was, the angler who finished second in the June tournament got a message from someone on Facebook … he’s the one who got that now famous picture of the cut-up kayak on the back of the deck,” Tammaro explains. “This guy had reached out to [Housman’s] buddy, who confirmed that [Housman] was cheating the whole time. He said [Housman had] cut up this cheap Walmart kayak, and he had a picture to prove it that was taken at a boat ramp.

After confirming that the boat-ramp photograph wasn’t Photoshopped or altered, Tammaro made the decision to ban Housman from the NYKBF for life. He says multiple kayak tournament clubs in New York and Pennsylvania have followed suit, and that national organizations are likely to do the same.

“I can’t say this for certain, but I wouldn’t be shocked if B.A.S.S. decides to ban him, along with Native,” Tammaro says. “He’s also being banned from TourneyX and Fishing Chaos, which are the two main tournament hosting platforms that everybody in the kayak fishing world uses … So even if [these other] org’s don’t ban him, there’s no way he can compete in a kayak tournament without falsifying an account.”

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Milstead and others in the competitive kayak fishing world are already calling for harsher punishments for Housman, including fines and potential criminal charges. Tammaro says he likely won’t pursue these, since the $200 Housman won (and then returned) from the online tournament isn’t enough to warrant any serious charges. Allegations that Housman stole the kayak and then cut out the seat have not been verified.