It
was a big weekend for alligator hunting in Missisippi. A six-person
crew led by hunter Sean King of Yazoo City hooked what they joked was
the Loch Ness Monster in Issaquena County.
The
six-person party spent the following two hours trying to wrestle the
behemoth into the boat and finally succeeded after two other hunters
offered assistance.
When the harvest was officially weighed, it
was obvious why they had so much trouble loading it. The gator came in
at an enormous 723.5 pounds, beating the state record for heaviest male
by 26 pounds.
But the record was only good for a
short time. At the same time, Dustin Bockman of Vicksburg and his crew
were chasing a very large alligator in the Mississippi River near Port
Gibson. They were able to shoot the animal after a couple of hours of
wrangling. Then there was a several-hours wait for help getting him into
a boat. That's when he heard about the earlier 723-pound gator.
Bockman
said he couldn’t believe it and thought he’d probably missed his chance
at the claim of harvesting a state-record alligator by an hour. “I knew
he was over 700, but I wasn’t sure about 723,” he said.
However, when Bockman’s 13-foot, 4.5-inch gator was lifted, the scales stopped at 727 pounds and the hour-old state record fell.
Believe
it or not, those weren't the only gator records broken in Mississippi.
Earlier in the weekend, Brandon “Boo” Maskew of Ellisville bagged a a
female alligator weighing 295.3 pounds, setting a state record for the
longest and heaviest female caught.
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