In this article, we study the logarithm of the central value L 1 2 , χ D in the symplectic family of Dirichlet L-functions associated with the hyperelliptic curve of genus δ over a fixed finite field F q in the limit as δ → ∞. Unconditionally, we show that the distribution of log L 1 2 , χ D is asymptotically bounded above by the Gaussian distribution of mean 1 2 log deg(D) and variance log deg (D). Assuming a mild condition on the distribution of the low-lying zeros in this family, we obtain the full Gaussian distribution.