my thought in getting my scale IGFA certified was along these lines...

It's 2am. You're shore fishing with a friend but there's no one around. The lake record is oh, say 18.6lbs. You catch a 19.5. You want to release the fish. Now what?

Or another one might go like this. The state record is 21lbs 12oz. You're fishing during the day but at a lake with no marina (yes there are several trophy lakes in Nor-Cal with no marinas). You catch a 21lb 15oz fish. You call DFG and they come on down to the lake. You beg the guy to let you take the fish to a nearby town to weigh it but he says no way, you can't break the law and transport live gamefish. You want to release the fish, what do you do?

Stuff like this seems kind of far fetched but it's exactly the kind of stuff that happens in reality. If you have an IGFA certified scale at least you stand a chance at getting the lake record or a state record. If you're scale is some $20 scale, do you think anyone is really going to believe you or trust you?

Personally if I got a lake record or a state record, I'd like to get the record, and if that costs me 90 bucks for a scale and 40 or 50 to get it certified, so be it. But, if I didn't have the scale and getting a lake record or a state record meant that I had to kill a huge fish that wasn't the world record, I wouldn't do it! I'd rather release a high teen fish than kill it just for the lake of getting a certified weight. I know some of you guys are real serious about big fish and that's the kind of stuff you should think about before you get to the lake, not after it happens.