On September 1, a team of hunters snagged a once-in-a-lifetime alligator while prowling Mississippi's Yazoo River in a 21-foot jon boat. When tag holder Megan Sasser and her crew finally managed to drag the massive gator ashore, it tipped scales at an astonishing 802 pounds and measured more than 14-feet long—less than a pound shy and just a few inches short of the Magnolia State record.
Sasser was hunting the Mississippi opener with five family members when they spotted the alligator from more than 100 yards away. She tells Field & Stream that the crew has been hunting gators together for a decade. On this year’s opener, they launched their boat around noon and had just ridden out a three-hour storm when they spotted the gator they were looking for while scanning the river with binoculars.
At first, the crew figured the gator to be somewhere between 10 and 12 feet long—a nice alligator in anyone’s book. They motored in for a closer look, and when it dipped below the surface, they decided to wait it out. “At that point, we had no idea how big he was," Sasser says. “We just knew he was a good gator.”
Eventually, the gator popped back up for air. When it did, Sasser’s crew was ready. They snagged it with large treble hooks tied to stout bait casting rigs, and after an hour-long fight it was close enough to the boat for Sasser to get a third and larger hook into it, which was attached to a 60-foot hand line.
With the hand line and two rods hooked into the gator, they pulled it in even further. In Mississippi, hunters have to "secure" their gators before dispatching them with a gunshot. In order to do that, the crew snared the alligator in two different spots and pulled it right next to boat.
“We decided we were going to dispatch him, and then he started to death roll,” she tells F&S. “He rolled close to 10 times and tore up both of the poles we’d hooked him with. Finally, he stayed still long enough for us to dispatch him with a 20 gauge shotgun.”
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The gator was so big they couldn't pull it aboard their 21-foot War Eagle, Sasser says, so the crew hitched it to the starboard side and motored toward the boat launch. Later that day, Sasser got the gator's official measurements at Red Antler Processing in Yazoo City. "We were just a few pounds shy of the record weight, two inches short of the record length, and less than an inch shy of the girth measurement needed to break the state record," Sasser recalls. "But we're not disappointed. It was still the catch of a lifetime."
