Gator Hunt 8/28/2015

Gator Hunt 8/28/2015

My friend Karl, Jim and I headed down to area 540 last night, driving through the storms to get there, arrived there to a light sprinkle, so we loaded up the Air boat than the sprinkle stopped and the rest of the night was very clear and cool, perfect conditions with only five minutes of a mist sprinkle all night...



we first ran up on two gators on our way to our area that were around 10 - 11 footers... than arrived in our area 540 first turn two nice gators but submerged fast, could not get them to take the bait...

same thing for several other areas we stopped at... We were able to have a nice fighting gator take the bait, we had him on the line for several minutes, kept bringing him out into the open water, and he kept darting back into and under the floating vegetation, we were not able to get his head out of the water to see the size of it, I tried to grapple it several times got the grapple onto his body but never penetrated his thick hide... after about 10 minutes of this he regurgitated the bait and line...

so we called it a night in this location and tailored that air boat and headed to another location... launched and jumped a few dozen gators had some right up on the side of the air boat within a foot of the air boat, which would have been an easy harpoon shot and kill, some were around 7-8 footers, but again none were over 10 foot so we called it a night...

$75.00 in gas for the air boat and $50,00 in Fuel for my truck on this trip and no keeper…



seen over 100 plus gators of all sizes throughout the night most not close enough to bag... the others that we ran up on that were within 1 ft of the boat and some touching the boat all would have been an easy harpoon shot and kill, were between 7 and 9 footers... nice by any means...

but I restrained myself from harpooning them, because I will have another month or searching for the right one hoping for an 11 plus footer...

It is so cool having some gators right up to the side of the air boat, looks like they could just jump into the boat..

here are some photos below of a 10 and 12 footer...

all in all a good night out hunting for the big'en



12 foot gator



12 foot gator to the right and an 11 footer to the left

Stopped at the processor to pick up my gator Meat and they were working on tanning some gator hides


Picked up my gator Head Trophy


and picked up 26 lbs of Gator Meat from my 8 foot gator... Guess what is for lunch today LOL


Central Florida Trophy Hunts Processing facility is top notch and their packaging is very clean and professional, here is some of my Tenderized fresh Gator meat packaged...

 

clean up the skull, trophy memory

 

I will be posting a how to report after my Hunt is over and I process the heads
there may not be any hole in the skull if you banged it just behind the pariental skull plate in the kill zone.

Thanks