When David Turner Jr. caught his 29.25 pound king salmon on Monday, he didn\u2019t expect it to be worth $12,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the biggest king salmon I have ever caught so it was pretty sweet. I thought it might place, but I definitely didn\u2019t think it was the first place fish,\u201d said Turner, who took home the top prize in the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska\u2019s Spring King Salmon Derby.<\/p>\n
Turner \u2014 who was fishing a herring with white and silver flasher at False Outer Point \u2014 found himself at the right place at the right time: 35 feet away from shore and fishing in 17 feet of water.<\/p>\n
\u201cI got real lucky and ran over the right fish at the right time. He was just hungry and I got lucky and went by him and he got it,\u201d Turner said. \u201cIt didn\u2019t feel as big as it was on the line.\u201d<\/p>\n
After catching the fish, David and his brother Stephen high-tailed it back to Auke Bay in his 19-foot Bayliner, then to Jerry\u2019s Meats to officially weigh the fish.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce we got to the dock my cousin Dennis came to help me take care of it. We put it on our scale and it was 32 pounds. We gilled and gutted it and it was still right above the 28 mark so we went right to Jerry\u2019s as fast as we could,\u201d Turner said.<\/p>\n
Turner does drywall and framing for Northern Lights Development and moved to Juneau four and a half years ago from Michigan. He\u2019s only been fishing two years and hopes to use the windfall of prize cash to vacation and spruce up his fishing boat.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m gonna go on a vacation, buy some new stuff for my fishing boat,\u201d said Turner. \u201cProbably go to Hawaii for sure, but that\u2019s later in the year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Turner won $10,500 in cash along with a slew of gift certificates for glacier tours, pizza, hardware stores, hotel stays and other goodies as the first place finisher. Turner also won \u201cbragging rights for the year,\u201d as he put it.<\/p>\n
The Spring King Derby is a month-long king salmon fishing contest that takes place every May. It benefits CCTHITA\u2019s higher education fund, which awards college scholarships to enrolled Tlingit and Haida tribal members.<\/p>\n
Turner\u2019s 29.25-pound fish edged out Cole Dysinger\u2019s 28.40-pound fish. Turner\u2019s catch is the smallest king to take the derby\u2019s top prize in its 20-year history, a full 3.4 pounds smaller than the next-smallest derby winner, Dan Neal\u2019s 32.65-pound winner from 2010. The biggest all-time winner was Robert A. Dilley\u2019s 51.40-pound fish in the 2004 derby. The average Spring King Salmon Derby winner has been 36.45 pounds.<\/p>\n
Look to the Empire online Friday afternoon to hear Turner tell his fish tale in a video interview.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When David Turner Jr. caught his 29.25 pound king salmon on Monday, he didn\u2019t expect it to be worth $12,000. \u201cThat\u2019s the biggest king salmon I have ever caught so it was pretty sweet. I thought it might place, but I definitely didn\u2019t think it was the first place fish,\u201d said Turner, who took home […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[149],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-14120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-outdoors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14120"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=14120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}