Keep an Eye on the Business End

While I was at UCF I made a lot of great friends who are very dear to me and have had an impact on my life. There was a walk-on O-lineman that has encouraged me, challenged me spiritually and became one of my best friends. One day we were talking, as men do, about this and that and one of us came up with the idea of hunting alligators. We did our research and bought our tags. He drove up to Gainesville and we set out for our first hunt. Neither one of us had any idea what we were doing. We got to the boat ramp and spent a half an hour draining my boat. It had filled with water when it rained because I had left the plug in. The motor wasn’t running right so we could only go about 3 miles an hour, I forgot my GPS and couldn’t find the boat ramp so we spent the entire night in the boat only to discover we were a short distance in front of the ramp. In spite of all that, we did catch a gator. Then we had no idea what to do with it. It is amazing we went back!
We have been out many times since then and caught numerous alligators. We have had nights where everything goes great and other nights where nothing goes as planned. We have been waist deep in the muck pulling the boat, we have had to stand on floating grass and drag the boat back to the water, we have had gators we thought were dead that walk across the bottom of the boat, and Skelly has even been thrown out of a boat into the lake!
About half way through the first season Dede relented and allowed me to take the kids gator hunting. One of the first nights we caught a nice 8’3” gator and they were right in the middle of it. I made sure they knew that the most import thing is to keep and eye on the "business end." Once they understood that, the fear was gone. They know that grabbing a gator by the tail or leg is OK; just watch the mouth. One night we had an 8 footer who got all tangled up. We were unable to get the boat back in the trees to him. My buddy Cary finally got a snare around his leg and cut the rope so we could pull him out. We hit him with a .38 cal bang stick which didn’t kill him; it just slowed him down. Since we had cut the rope I had him by his legs. He was angled where we could not safely hit him with the bang stick again. I was ready to be done. It was late and this was our last night for the season. The gator was opening and closing his mouth and I had the timing down, so I told Hannah, my 10yr old at the time, to grab his leg. Without hesitation she grabbed his leg and I grabbed his mouth when he closed it. We taped him up and threw him in the boat to end another successful season.
Alligator hunting has been one of the best things we do as a family. My children have courage, they are resourceful, they are tough, they are imaginative and most of all, they have great stories to tell kids on the play ground! We were at the UCF vs UF softball game for the Regional tournament. A man sat down in front of us wearing his gator costume (blue and orange t-shirt, shorts hat etc.). My son Timothy said, "a good gator is a dead gator!" The man turned around and asked, “Do you know how to kill a gator?” With a proud look on his face Timothy said yes and began giving a lesson. The man asked, “Have you ever killed a gator?” Timothy responded with a giant smile, “Yes, 6 foot 1!” Come to find out the man’s wife works for a gator processor in Christmas Florida. Imagine that. ~Jay