2023-08-28 18:45:45
Mississippi hunters captured an 800-pound alligator early Saturday. He was 14 feet 3 inches long, a state record. (Red Antler Processin / The Washington Post)
It was long before dawn, and Will Thomas and his band of Mississippi hunters were trying to capture an alligator. They had no idea how big it was, they just knew that it had given them everything they could hold for seven hours on the Yazoo River.
In the end, after destroying almost all of the boat’s equipment, the huge animal was brought ashore early on Saturday. Their measurements stunned the hunters: They had landed a male alligator that weighed 802.5 pounds (364 kilos) and was 14 feet 3 inches long (4.3 meters). Its length broke the state record for the longest alligator ever caught, according to the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fish and Parks.
“It was pandemonium. It was chaos,” Thomas, a 43-year-old attorney from Madison, Mississippi, told The Washington Post. “When you have an 800-pound animal on the end of a fishing pole, and it comes up close and looks like a beast, everyone goes crazy, and your adrenaline goes through the roof.” The hunters finished off the alligator with a shotgun blast, after tying a noose on it in accordance with state law, according to Thomas.
Photos shared with The Post show the grinning hunters – Thomas, Don Woods, Tanner White and Joey Clark – holding the huge alligator with its mouth open. The hunters have earned praise from the Mississippi PMA, Gov. Tate Reeves (R) and observers who called the sighting of the record-breaking alligator “nightmare material.”
“Its size was impressive, but we didn’t think it was anything special,” Thomas said. “But when we pulled it out, got out the tape measure, and realized it was over 14 feet, the excitement level went up.”
The WFP confirmed the measurements of the record-breaking alligator, saying in a Facebook post that the animal had an abdominal girth of 66 inches and a tail girth of 46.5 inches. The agency noted that the previous record for the longest alligator caught was set in 2017 with an animal measuring 14 feet 3/4 inches long.
“It really surprised me,” Andrew Arnett, WFP’s alligator program coordinator, told The Post. “It’s not every year that you get something of this magnitude.”
The world record for alligator length is 15 feet 9 inches (4.8 meters), measured in 2014 in Alabama. Mississippi began offering alligator sport hunting seasons in 2005. More than 950 alligator hunting tags were awarded in a lottery system to Mississippi hunters this year during the 10-day season, Arnett said. This year’s season started on Friday and ends on Labor Day.
Thomas was not chosen in this year’s lottery, but Woods, his cousin, was selected for a brand, he said. The two hung out with White and Clark on the first day of the season last week in the state’s Midwest alligator hunting area, Thomas said.
A 14-foot alligator inside a 14-foot boat in Mississippi (Will Thomas/The Washington Post)
The group had an alligator in mind when they set out on Friday. It was a rather large one that had been sighted in the Yazoo River and would probably still be there to be hunted, Thomas said. He did not want to say where he was exactly, since a hunter “does not want anyone to know his place.”
“We knew it was at least 12 feet and we knew more or less where it was. When we put the boat in that night we went straight to that place,” she said. “Alligators are territorial and the biggest ones stay in the same place. This one was especially territorial, and did not leave a 200-meter zone.
At 9 pm Friday, Woods managed to hook the alligator before it broke loose. The group did the same again. And again. And again. Over hours, the alligator broke the hook nine or 10 times by going under logs or sitting on the bottom of the river, Thomas said. In the process, the alligator smashed his reels and even broke a rod.
“We probably didn’t have the best team because it broke everything we had,” Thomas said. “At the end of the night, I didn’t think we could catch him because our team was wrecked.”
Woods told the Clarion-Ledger the size of the alligator they had been trying to get into their tiny boat for hours.
“His back was gigantic,” Woods said, adding that the experience was “surreal.”
The men knew they did not have long before the sun came up and the brutal heat of the Mississippi returned. They tried one more time with the equipment they could still use.
Then, at 3:30 a.m. Saturday morning, they managed to kill the alligator. Thirty minutes later, the alligator was safely on the boat. Exhausted and excited, the men soon faced the question of their own safety in a small boat carrying an 800-pound alligator that covered the entire boat.
“The boat started to take on water and we had to take it to the other side to prevent it from sinking,” says Thomas. “There were four guys and a 15-foot alligator in a 15-foot boat, so we couldn’t do anything for a while.”
The group made it ashore and headed to have the alligator measured at Red Antler Processing, a wild game hunting and processing shop in Yazoo City, more than 40 miles north of Jackson. Shane Smith, owner of Red Antler Processing, told The Post that the alligator immediately caught his eye.
“When they stopped they said they had a very large alligator and about 14 feet. I’ve heard that many times, and most of the time it’s an exaggeration,” Smith said. “But this one wasn’t.”
Smith notified the WFP that the alligator had broken the record at 14 feet 3 inches. When Smith saw that the alligator had a metal tag on its end, he realized that he had been caught and released before, and called WFP to find out more.
“In 2005, a resident living near Vicksburg called [al PMA] to get this alligator removed from their property because it was a nuisance,” Smith told the Post, adding that it was relocated to the Yazoo River. At the time, the alligator measured 3 meters and 5 centimeters, according to Smith.
The days since they captured the record-breaking alligator have been overwhelming for the men, Thomas said. “Talking to someone from the Washington Post was not something I thought I would be doing on a Monday morning,” he said.
The men donated the 340 pounds of alligator meat to Red Antler, who will donate it to hunger shelters in need. Woods, the tag holder, will receive the alligator’s head, and the others will “do something special with the skin,” Thomas said.
When asked how he felt when the giant alligator was brought onto the boat, Thomas said he will always remember feeling mentally drained and exhausted knowing that the group had finished the biggest hunt of his life.
“We had been fighting and you’re glad the fighting is over,” Thomas said. “We all feel like, thank goodness the fight is over, and we’ve won.”
(C) The Washington Post.-
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