Kayaker Claimed He Had to Pee and Wasn’t Trying to Sneak Across Border

When you have to go, you have to go.

That he was looking for a dry place to urinate was a Canadian kayaker’s excuse for stepping on U.S. soil Thursday, the Detroit Free Press reports.

But the U.S. border patrol isn’t buying the full bladder story.

In a complaint filed in U.S. District Court, the government said Jack Bishop, 48, is a convicted felon who was trying to sneak into the country, something he had also tried to do in April.

A registered sex offender with a lengthy criminal history in Canada, he was permanently barred from the United States in 2006 after misrepresenting himself at the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, the newspaper said.

Besides the charge that landed Bishop on Canada’s sex offender registry, Bishop’s rap sheet includes robbery with violence, breaking and entering, and theft in Chatham, Ontario

Bishop was caught Thursday in a “no trespassing zone” near historic Fort Wayne, located on a bend in the Detroit River about a mile from the Canadian shore.

Border patrol agents had been alerted to the presence of “a possible homeless man” in the area, a heavily wooded area notorious for criminal activity, and saw Bishop wearing a life preserver next to the inflatable kayak.

When they asked him to explain his presence in a restricted area, Bishop said he “had the urge to urinate, so he  decided to make entry into the United States and find a place to relieve himself,” the government alleged in the complaint against him.

Bishop gave a different reason for trying to cross into the United States when he was questioned at the Detroit Border Patrol Station. He claimed he was coming into the country to play three-card poker at the Motor City Casino.

Bishop is being held in the United States and will be arraigned on an unlawful re-entry charge on June 25.