ON YOUR MARK, GET SET ... PLOD: Remembering a Destin tradition (PHOTOS)

Who doesn’t remember Destin’s roster of annual events: The Fishing Rodeo, the Seafood Festival, Founders Day — and the Gopher Turtle Races?

“It was races like NASCAR or the Indy 500,” former Destin resident Jimmy Vaughn told The Log, though he didn’t suggest the turtles attained similar speeds. “We had a 600-inch racetrack, about 50 feet, that was the Gopher 500. People would sponsor the gophers — we had a huge board set up with the names (of the turtles) and the sponsors.”

The races were an annual event for several years in the 1980s, serving as a fund-raiser for the Lion’s Club, which sold the rights to sponsor the various turtles. Vaughn said they’d adopted the idea from the Panama City Lions Club.

“We rented the gophers from fishermen and hunters in Bay County that would capture them and save them for us,” Vaughn said. “They’d bring them over in their truck, we’d have it in the middle of the summer ... It was a lot of fun, especially with the children.”

The event took place in the First National Bank parking lot at Shores Shopping Center, boxed off with sponsors’ names on the track wall, where the positions of turtles at the end of the race would also go up.

“I think altogether we had maybe 25 gophers.” Vaughn said. “It was a lot of fun, children sat on the sidelines and rooted the gophers on.”

“It wasn’t really that much excitement to me, but it was kind of fun to watch,” lifelong Destin resident Cyron Marler said, adding that he’d never really found it fun enough to participate. “They’re slow turtles — they’re much more good eating than they were anything.”

In the 1984 race, according to The Log’s files, the turtles weren’t only slow, they crawled the wrong way. Rather than run for the roses in 90-degree heat, a number of turtles headed away from the finish line and back to the volunteer with the garden hose who’d cooled them off before they’d entered the track. In one of the qualifying races, only four turtles reached the finish line.

In that year’s final Lope for the Lettuce round, Dorothy’s Dollar came in first, followed by Gopher Broke.
Vaughn and fellow former Lion Jim Foreman said the races ended late in the 1980s after complaints about the turtles being mistreated, which Vaughn denied.

“We took really good care of those gophers,” Vaughn said. “We kept them fed, shaded, cool, they were in a lot better shape in the gopher races than in the wilderness.”

“Rather than being controversial, we decided to do something else and went on to other fund-raisers,” Vaughn said. “It wasn’t so essential we couldn’t move on to something else.”