BY RUSTY DAWDY
Long before the internet and Google, we had to figure out solutions to life’s dilemmas ourselves. This included hunting and fishing techniques. We would question friends or acquaintances and gradually piece together something that resembled a plan. Then we gained experience trying to execute these schemes. If you were lucky, some of these brainstorming sessions would even lead to great friendships.
Somewhere around 2003, I met up with my friend Mitch at Pepper’s for a late lunch. He brought along Gary. A few years older, he had grown up in the same town, but we never really knew each other. We immediately hit it off, and our 2 pm lunch led to afternoon drinks and then dinner. We finally sobered up, closed out our second invoice and went home to face the music for our irresponsible behavior. “What in the world were y’all talking about for six hours?” my wife asked. As I began to explain to her what we had figured out, she was immediately bored. This is why men need friends.
At that time, Gary’s family owned many of the lakes around the old Sulphur mines. The previous year he had applied and qualified for gator tags and was trying to figure out alligator hunting.
For this story to make any sense at all, we need to remember the very early 2000s. The internet wasn’t yet the complete wealth of information it is today. There was no Gator Boys or Swamp People on reality TV. Choot’em, Troy! wasn’t yet printed on t-shirts and bumper stickers. Gator hunters were a small community and largely kept to themselves. It was also largely a Cameron thing, and we were three young Sulphur guys. If we were going to figure this out, we were going to have to do it ourselves.
Gary had managed to harvest a few small gators with the previous year’s tags, but he had unsuccessfully gone several rounds with the lake’s alpha-female. The prior season, she had straightened hooks, straightened heavier hooks, broken ropes, broken a chain and dragged an entire tree into the lake. She was between 10 and 13 feet long and an absolute monster.
At some point, Gary read an article about alligator hunting in Georgia. Those hunters would shoot the giant reptiles and then throw a grapple to retrieve them after they died. Gary got two shots off before she sounded; both hit the mark. Five minutes later, while Gary was throwing a homemade grapple, she popped back up beside his boat like nothing had happened. She did, however, suffer an eye injury from a gunshot, which bothered Gary all winter.
Like most hunters, Gary’s ethics were paramount. He would never intentionally or carelessly wound an animal. While fishing that spring, he watched her eat a 5-pound bass he had just released. His sympathy and guilt dwindled greatly. He was also able to discern that she hadn’t lost sight in her injured eye, which was now bright red. His kids began calling her Ol’ Red-Eye. She was way too big for that small lake and really needed to go.
To accompany our Pepper’s margaritas and day drinking, Gary shared with us his prior season’s saga, and Mitch and I couldn’t help but chime in. I was never much of a big game hunter; at that time, I hadn’t yet learned to embrace the solidarity of it. To me, deer hunting usually amounted to waking up at 4 am to go sleep in a tree. On the bright side, all three of us had grown up as Gen X latchkey kids in the 80s. Getting into trouble, then figuring out needlessly complex quandaries, seemed to be our gift to society. We began devising a plan.
What I lacked in alligator knowledge I made up for in big game fishing experience. That’s when I blurted out, “What if we treated this gator like a really big fish?” We slowly and meticulously talked through every single detail like we were planning a bank heist. We could use boat dock lines which were designed to add more stretch and strength than most conventional ropes. To it, we’d be able to fashion a small cable steel leader like one used for large shark fishing.
What if we snelled the hook to the cable and used a modified Bimini knot to the rope to give it even more strength and flex? Maybe we could also tie an inline rubber bushing in the rope near the tree? That would allow the whole line to have an extra foot of give.
Once hooked, we would handline the gator to a boat and not to land. That would be much safer, and less likely to break off, as we certainly didn’t want to come face to face with a monster gator. When we got it close enough, we could use a flying gaff to strike the gator and allow it to play out in the water.
Finally, instead of a gun, we could use a bam stick to shoot the massive dinosaur at point blank range. No ricochets like before. Gators aren’t that different from fish. So, what could possibly go wrong?
Gator season came, and we couldn’t wait to try out our newly developed system. Opening night, we set only one line, a whole chicken high enough in a tree that it would take a juggernaut of a gator to retrieve it. We got there just after dawn the next morning, filled with anticipation. Gary couldn’t stand it, so he showed up an hour before us. We had a gator on the line! It had to be her.
We launched Mitch’s obnoxiously large bay boat off the side of the bank of the small lake. By the time we maneuvered through the brush and branches the boat was full of small broken vegetation and debris. Once out in the middle of the lake, inch by inch we slowly began pulling the rope toward the boat like we were checking a crab line. Then suddenly, on the port side, it was her and she was huge.
Her red eye breached the surface first, but she immediately emerged fully and gave a rapid shiver, throwing water feet into the air. All three of us, above-average-weight men, were on the same side of
the boat, causing the vessel to list greatly, and I was on the front casting deck with the large flying gaff. With all my strength and mass, I came up from underneath the gator to stick the gaff square into her chest.
At that exact moment I learned two things I didn’t yet fully understand about gators: First, they’re neutrally buoyant. Secondly, their hide is really, really thick. As I thrust upward with the gaff, I fell backward onto the deck. The steel tip had barely even pierced the surface of her chest. Instead, I had somehow managed to yank the massive, angry alligator out of the lake and onto the front deck of our bay boat, which was listing.
Spinning out on the deck covered in debris, I quickly, although inefficiently, scrambled atop the seat in front of the center console while this prehistoric giant thrashed back and forth. She was now tangled in both the flying gaff rope and the dock line we had originally used to catch her. She was hissing and slamming her enormous tail with her deadly mouth open. Lunging and shaking, I could feel and smell her rancid breath, even from four feet away.
The guys in the back of the boat frantically fumbled the bang stick toward me, which was loaded with a 12-gauge slug. Mitch was screaming, “shoot it, shoot it!” like all of our lives depended on it. I was screaming. Gary was screaming. The gator was screaming.
I was finally able to convey that I did not want to blow a hole in Mitch’s boat. “I don’t care; Just do it!” he yelled from the back. I knew that he actually did very much care. That was just Mitch’s way when he got excited. After what seemed to be an absolute eternity — probably 90 seconds — the gator was able to silkily free herself from the pile of ropes and silently, peacefully slip back into the water. She didn’t even make a splash.
Exhausted, I stepped down from the seat upon which I was perched, and we all sat silently for probably a minute. Then, almost on cue, we all simultaneously began laughing. Talking over each other, we loudly shared accounts of the whole ordeal from our separate perspectives, as if each of us hadn’t just witnessed it up-close and firsthand. Then we repeated our stories again and again, gradually talking over each other less while playfully mocking each other about some of the choice quotes that had been said in the moment.
We gathered our stuff, cleaned up our mess, put the boat back on the trailer and left. We never tried to harvest that gator again.
Over the years, like most relationships, Mitch, Gary and I have gone our separate ways. Life just took us all in different directions. Mitch and I cross paths regularly but don’t socialize much anymore. I know if I needed something tomorrow, he’d be here. I ran into Gary about a year ago. We talked about guitars and music and laughed about some other exploits. I asked about Ol’ Red-Eye. He said he’d seen her regularly while fishing for the next 15 or 16 years, but after Hurricane Laura, she seemed to have disappeared.
I guess we’ll never really know if she finally died or just moved on.
Comments are closed.