Season opens next weekend, share your tales
“These alligators are sneaky little critters,” said my hunting buddy’s young son, Austin Partridge. “Dad and those guys are way down there at the other end of this slough, and look, here’s a gator right behind our boat.”
Say what?
I looked around my 75 horseMerc and couldn’t believe what I saw — two big red eyes were looking back at me from the waterline about 10 feet from my boat.
So close was he that the reflection in its eyes was coming from my boat’s rear anchor light.
The alligator was just sitting there on the surface looking at us, kind of like he was sizing up this thing that was invading his territory.
No telling how long he had been there, or from where he had come. It was like, all of a sudden, he was there, easing toward us in an old slough behind Houseboat Beach on the upper Pearl River area of Barnett Reservoir.
This was no ordinary gator, either. He was huge. The gap between his eyes was wide; the space between the bridge of his nose and the crown of his brow was long. I remembered the rule of thumb, each inch from nose to eyes equals one foot in body length.
Whoa.
I quit counting inches when I got to double figures.
“Holy cow, Austin, that’s a monster,” I whispered back to my young friend. “Don’t move. Don’t turn on a light. Let’s see if he will stick around until your Dad and them can get back down here.”
I was in the front of the boat with my hand on the trolling motor handle. I spun it to the lowest power setting and started easing the bow to the right to get a better view. As I turned, the gator pivoted with me until we were parallel in the water, like a pair performing a water ballet.
By then I had cell phone in hand and was texting the other boat.
“BIG GATOR right by us.”
“Over 10 long, less than 10 away.”
“Do you think they got the text?” Austin said.
The answer came quickly when all of a sudden a pair of Q-Beams turned and lit us up.
“Reckon so,” I said, “they’re coming.”
In the boat with Keith Partridge, Austin’s dad, was Corey Hunt, a licensed and experienced nuisance gator trapper. Hunt started texting back instructions.
“Don’t scare it”
“Turn your lights off”
By now they had closed to within 50 yards but couldn’t see the gator because we were between their lights and the lizard.
“Behind me! Other side!” I texted.
“Just sitting there. Not in your light.”
“When you get close I will ease up in pads. Clear casting lane.”
Hunt didn’t bother to text back; didn’t need to. They were 20 yards from us with rods raised and ready. Partridge was signaling me to move my boat to the pads in front of me.
With the trolling motor still on low, I started easing ahead.
With his eyes still on us, the gator followed.
I stopped before the pads. He stopped before the pads.
“Just get out of the way, and give us a shot,” Keith Partridge whispered, loudly.
I turned the power on the trolling motor handle to 10, turned the tiller 90 degrees to my left and stepped on the button. The 18½-foot aluminum boat spun on a dime.
I flinched, waiting for the big 12/0 weighted hooks to whiz by my head.
They never did.
As suddenly and as abruptly as the gator had appeared just minutes earlier, it disappeared, never to be seen again.
“Y’all been pulling our legs,” Partridge hollered.
Said his son: “Dad, he was right there. What took you so long?”
We turned on all the lights we had and started looking for a sign of movement, like bubble trails, a wake or vegetation moving. We saw nothing at all.
We anchored the two boats and tried to wait out the big beast.
One hour and a thousand mosquito bites later, we gave up. The hunters in the other boat were accusing us of making the whole thing up. After all, it had been my idea to check this slough because two months earlier I saw a big bull gator with a big female gator sunning on the front or beach side of the island.
That hunt was in the September season of 2009.
In November 2009, just two months later, bass pro Pete Ponds and I were back in that same slough chasing bass in the shad-filled pads just a few yards from our late-night gator encounter. We had caught some nice fish and were getting ready to take some photos for Ponds’ sponsors.
As I was down in the boat digging into my camera bag, Ponds started calling me.
“Look at the size of that thing,” he said.
I looked up and saw a 9-foot alligator about 10 feet away from us on a clear spot on the bank. It was hissing and showing its teeth, letting us know it was not happy about our intrusion.
“Pete, that’s the mama, look over there,” I said. “Check that big boy.”
About 10 feet down the bank in a shady spot with more vegetation, a giant bull gator was sitting still. Only his eyes moved as he followed our boat’s drift.
“What do you think, 11 or 12 feet?” Ponds asked.
“He’s every bit of 12,” I said. “Hold on. I have got to get some photos.”
Pete kicked the back end of the boat closer toward the gator and I clicked off a few shots. Less than 10 feet away, the big gator never seemed fazed by the whole thing, even when I used a flash.
The female was just the opposite. She took a running start and lunged off the bank at us, splashing me with the muddy water.
That did get the big gator’s attention, and he started sliding down into the water. He moved maybe a foot, just enough to get his snout on the surface, I guess to be in position to make a fast move if he felt the need.
About that time, Ponds set the hook on another big bass and I started snapping pictures.
“Pete this would be a good time to get one of those low-on-the-water-fish-landing photos, you know where you reach down and grab the fish and I get shots as you pick him up,” I said, kidding Ponds.
He wasn’t biting on that one, and wasn’t going to give either of those gators a chance to bite him either.
But I got exactly what I wanted. I raced home and immediately downloaded the photos of the gators and sent them to Partridge with this e-mail caption:
“We told you it was a big one.”
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Mississippi’s statewide public lands alligator hunting season begins a week from today (Aug. 30). A total of 920 permits were available and close to 3,000 licensed hunters are expected to be on the water.
We always get a lot of good stories out of the hunts. If you have one to tell, send us a photo and contact number and we’ll get in touch and share it with our readers. Send them to bobbyc7754@gmail.com.
Who knows, maybe our big boy is still out there.
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Mississippi Alligator Seasons
Public Lands: Opens at noon on Friday, Aug. 30 and ends at noon on Monday, Sept. 9. A total of 920 permits were awarded after June application and drawing process. Limit is two gators per permit, both of which must exceed 4 feet and only one can exceed 7 feet.
Private Lands: Opens at noon on Friday, Aug. 30, and ends at 6 a.m. on Sept. 23. Only those hunters who applied for permits are allowed to hunt. Limits were based on acreage.
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