Four hunters bagged the biggest alligator ever officially caught in the state of Mississippi after an all-night battle.
Alligator hunter Donald Woods of Oxford, Mississippi, went hunting on the Yazoo River on August 25 with three friends: Joey Clark of Jackson, Will Thomas of Madison, and Tanner White of Flora. The men had caught 12-foot alligators before, but the largest ever officially caught had been a mammoth 14-foot, 3/4-inch behemoth caught in 2017.
“We got on the water right at dark,” Woods stated. “We were seeing a lot of alligators. It was a calm night. We saw a lot of 8-footers, 10-footers, but that’s not what we were after. … We’ve been hunting these things a long time. We’ve killed a lot of 12-footers.”
Then they saw the enormous alligator. “We knew he was wide,” Woods recalled. “His back was humongous. It was like we were following a jon boat.”
Later, gator: Record-shattering 800-pound ‘nightmare material’ alligator caught in Mississippi https://t.co/sG1nlUXVgd pic.twitter.com/6paOLJdfCB
— New York Post (@nypost) August 28, 2023
Woods hooked the alligator at roughly 9 p.m. “We held onto him a while — until 10 or so,” Woods said. “He broke my rod at that point. We hooked him eight or nine times and he kept breaking off. He would go down, sit and then take off. He kept going under logs. He knew what he was doing. The crazy thing is he stayed in that same spot.”
“There was no moving him,” Woods admitted. “We couldn’t do anything with him. He dictated everything we did. It was exhausting, but your adrenaline is going so you don’t notice it. It was more mentally exhausting than anything because he kept getting off.”
By the early morning, when the men’s assortment of rods and reels had been rendered unusable, the alligator started losing steam. “We were down to pretty much down to those two rods and reels at that point,” Woods acknowledged.
The men were able to hoist the gator into the boat by 4 a.m.
“We just knew we had a big alligator,” Woods stated. “We were just amazed at how wide his back was and how big the head was. It was surreal, to tell you the truth.”
Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks Alligator Program coordinator Andrew Arnett weighed and measured the gator; it was 14 feet, 3 inches and weighed 802.5 pounds.
“We’re done with chasing big ones this year,” Woods laughed. “I might even call it a career after that, honestly.”
One woman commented on the Facebook post showing the alligator: “Jurassic World! TRex without legs!!!”