A Derby win 50 years in the making

Don Zenger sat at the bar at Louie’s Douglas Inn, waiting for a bomb to explode.

It was Sunday afternoon on the last day of the Golden North Salmon Derby. The blast — a tradition which signals the end of the derby at three ports around town — was due at 6 p.m.

A little more than 24 hours earlier, Zenger had caught the biggest coho of his life, an 18.8-pounder that put him firmly at the top of the Derby leaderboard. If nobody turned in a fish bigger than Zenger’s by the end of the Derby, he would take home $10,000 in prize money.

Zenger returned at 2 p.m. to his Douglas home a few blocks up the street from Louie’s. Done with fishing for the weekend, he had nothing to do but listen to the Derby standings on the radio, wondering if his fish would hold up.

The anticipation was too much. Zenger needed a beer. He was in his seat at Louie’s by 5:30 p.m. The bartenders had the radio on, listening to Derby updates.

“They said, ‘You’re gonna make it, you’re gonna make it,’ and I said, ‘Not until 6 I’m not,’” Zenger said during a Tuesday interview at his home. “I don’t think I have been that nervous for a long, long time. I think if I had taken my blood pressure, I would have broken the machine.”

When the bomb finally went off, Zenger rang the bell above the bar. After decades of fishing the Golden North Salmon Derby, the 71-year-old retired electrician had finally won.

It was his turn to buy a round.

“It was pretty exciting. You know, I had been trying 50 years to win that darn thing, it was just something,” Zenger said, still riding high from the win. “It was my time to buy, you know? We’ve always had a tradition, all us friends here in Douglas. … Whoever won had to buy everyone else a beer.”

Now a Douglas resident, Zenger fishes a lot out of Douglas Harbor on the other side of town where he caught his Derby winner. But he knew the area well; he and his siblings grew up 16 miles north of downtown.

As a child, Zenger remembers fishing the Derby with his family. It was then he learned where the best coho spots north of town.

“Dad had this old wooden, 16-foot plywood boat with this old, cranky 25 Evinrude on it. Half the time he’d have to wrap a rope around the flywheel to get it started. He’d be cursing and yelling and all that. We’d roll that boat down on logs to the water — it seemed like it was always low tide then,” he said.

He says he’s fished the Derby at least 50 times in his life. After moving to Douglas, he fished mostly south of town out of Douglas Harbor, recently renamed Mike Pusich Douglas Harbor. But with fishermen unable to retain king salmon in or out of the Derby this year, Zenger proposed returning to the north end with his fishing partner and nephew Adam Zenger.

After catching a few small fish on Friday, Don Zenger hooked the fish around an 11 a.m. tide change on the backside of Lincoln Island. They had caught four small cohos on Saturday when the tip of pole again bounced.

“That dang thing, it was going, ‘dink, dink, dink, dink,’ on the pole and I thought it was another small one,” Don Zenger said with a hearty laugh. “Then I unclipped the downrigger, pulled on the pole and the fight was on. I told Adam, ‘I think this is a bigger fish than the one we’ve been catching.’”

The fish had taken the hook deep, all the way to the gills. It bled in the water. The fight lasted about 10 minutes, Don Zenger said, but it was tiring. The fish ran a few times before Adam Zenger guided it into his net.

“We threw him in the boat and by then my knees were knocking. I said, ‘Adam, that fish is 16, 18 pounds,’” Zenger said.

When they first weighed the Derby winner, Don Zenger’s recently-purchased scale read 19 pounds.

“‘We have to run this one in!’” Don told Adam, and the pair started out for Amalga Harbor.

“It was rougher than hell in the (North) Pass, we had to slow down and practically idle through there,” in Adam’s semi-flat bottom jet boat, Don said.

But they made it in, where they officially weighed the fish in at 18.8 pounds, more than two pounds above the previous leader at the time. Several fish would come close to knocking Don Zenger off the top spot by the end of the Derby — he had calls coming in from friends informing him that they were bringing in bigger fish — but none would stick.

He says he’ll use the prize money to pay down a new furnace he’s bought. But the win means more than the money. As an avid fishermen and a Juneauite born and raised, winning the Derby has always topped his bucket list.

Zenger remembers once tying for the lead with a 22-pound king salmon. Back then, ties were broken by a high-card draw out of a deck of playing cards. Don lost.

This time, he didn’t need luck.

“There’s been a lot of good memories. A lot of sandwiches, coffee and in the old days, beer,” Zenger said. “The Derby in this town is a pretty important thing. … Sometimes good things happen at the right time.”