Sarasota Slam reels in fishing adventure

Layla Turner had gone fishing with her dad before, spending countless trips with him learning to catch fish ever since she was a little girl. She’s gotten good at it too, if you hear her father Brian talk about it.

But Layla, 14, was recently offered a new opportunity — joining her dad on the water for days during Manatee-Sarasota Building Industry Association’s 20th annual Sarasota Slam fishing tournament.

Layla, her father and other teams headed 160 miles southwest of Sarasota to hunt big game. Out there, Layla  felt a tug on her fishing rod. not the routine bites she was accustomed to. The fish on Layla’s hook was a massive yellowfin tuna and long as she was tall.

After two straight hours of fighting and wrangling, Layla brought the monster fish aboard.

“He just kept going down every time,” Layla Turner said. “I got tired, really tired. It hurts your lower back.”

“I’ve been fishing all my life and have been waiting for my kids to get old enough to go (on a tournament),” Brian Turner said. “The weather was right, 160 miles over three nights is pretty grueling. But (Layla) is an athlete, she was ready.”

Great catches like that were seen by an enthusiastic crowd at Marina Jack’s throughout Saturday, Aug. 8, the final day of the tournament. MSBIA staff and volunteers welcomed returning boats from a four-day expedition and weighed their largest catches. It all culminated with a final weigh in on Aug. 8.

“Today’s the best part, a lot of work goes into this,” MSBIA CEO Jon Mast said. 

More than 50 boats with at least four fishermen each participated in this year’s event. The tournament is based on a catch-and-release points system. 

MSBIA partners with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and had a silent auction inside Marina Jack. Of the fish brought to shore, the Fillet for Friends organization prepared them for local homeless shelters.

This year’s tournament featured Offshore and Inshore divisions and had the return of the billfish marlin category. Fishing boats took photos of fish and sent them to MSBIA staff to verify size and points.

Sarasota resident Mark Miller and the Papa Pez team won this year’s billfish category with two blue marlin tagged.