PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. (AP) – Not many people would pay more than $1,500 a pound for lake trout, but that’s what Michael Michener got when he won the 24th annual Lake Champlain International Fishing Derby.

Michener’s 13.11-pound fish, caught on the derby’s third and final day Monday just south of Cumberland Head, netted the man from the town of Peru $20,000.

“Just as soon as we got him to the surface we could tell he was big,” said Michener, who immediately took the big fish into Plattsburgh to be weighed at an official LCI check-in station. The fish was weighed in, photographed and released alive back into the lake.

“It was a beautiful, healthy looking fish,” said Dave Adams of the LCI, who weighed the lake trout. “When we released it, it swam away nicely.”

The fish set an LCI record for lake trout weight, a special category that immediately qualified it for a $10,000 bonus. In addition, the laker will help Michener win the cold-water super grand prize category as well as the lake trout division.

Michener said he planned to split the winnings among a crew of three anglers who fish with him aboard his 22-foot Starcraft.

Jeffrey Brown of Vergennes, Vt., could have won $10,000, too. He weighed in a 9.97-pound walleye on Sunday that set an LCI record, but derby officials said Brown didn’t purchase an additional tag for his derby registration, making him ineligible for the special record-setting giveaway.

James Ehlers, executive director of the LCI, said Michener’s and Brown’s derby-record fish are proof that Lake Champlain’s fishing is improving, thanks to a program controlling the number of parasitic sea lamprey in the lake.

“When the LCI derby record was set on lake trout it was in 1996 and the walleye record was set in 1997,” Ehlers said. “It’s no coincidence those were the final years of a lamprey control program that has just been restarted here. We’d been seeing a downward trend in the health of some fish for the last few years, but the excitement of seeing an upward trend is too much to contain. People are excited.”