Crew of fisherman catches 39-pound salmon during tournament

MUSKEGON, Mich. (AP) — A crew of fishermen reeled in a 39-pound record-setting salmon during a tournament in Muskegon over the weekend.

“You feel like it’s a stroke of luck, you feel like maybe you did something right. I’m still kind of in awe about it,” Nate Wellman, the boat’s captain, told MLive.com. The crew included his son Jackson Cole.

Wellman said the catch came 10 minutes of setting lines in the water. The team wrestled the fish for about an hour and it took two men to lift it in the boat.

The 39.2-pound salmon is the heaviest fish in the history of the Tournament Trail Muskegon Open, a Lake Michigan fishing circuit that started in 2003, according to a post on the tournament’s Facebook page.

The record for a Michigan chinook salmon is 46 pounds, which was caught in 1978, according to Michigan Department of Natural Resources records.