Woman’s Massive Alabama Gator Could Be New World Record

Some family outings consist of a picnic basket and a rousing game of wiffle ball, while others involve a 20-gauge shotgun and a half-ton Alabama alligator.

Mandy and John Stokes, accompanied by her brother-in-law Kevin Jenkins and his two children, Savannah and Parker, landed a 15-foot, 1,011.5-pound alligator in the early hours of Saturday morning in a creek 80 miles west of Montgomery.

When Stokes was lucky enough to be issued one of the state’s coveted tags for the six-day season, she couldn’t have anticipated that she’d wind up killing what would become a new Alabama state record.

Not only did Stokes’ gator crush the standing record, a 14-foot, 2-inch, 838-pound monster caught by Keith Fancher in 2011, her prize has the potential to become a world record for the species. The standing world record is an 880-pound gator killed in Texas that was 14 feet, 8 inches long.

The fight lasted a total of 10 hours and the first attempt to weigh the beast at a Roland Cooper State Park check-in station resulted in a broken wench. The crew needed a backhoe to hoist the alligator for official weighing.

Though it was her first Alabama gator hunt and hopes it won’t be her last, Mandy Stokes has her reservations about going through an ordeal of that magnitude again.

“Right now the fairest way for me to say it is that we’ll apply again, but I can assure you, I have no desire to hook into anything like this again. I truly don’t,” she said.

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Maryellen Mara-Christian killed a 1,025 pound gator in South Carolina in 2010. The gator was 13-feet, 5 inches long, which may be a record but game officials in South Carolina do not keep records of killed gators.

Tom Grant killed his Mississippi state record gator in September of 2012, weighing in at 697.5 pounds and stretching out to 13 feet, 1.5 inches. Grant and three other men killed the gator in Issaquena County, which is where the previous state record (690.5 pounds) came from.

This Arkansas behemoth weighed in at 1,380 pounds and was 13 feet, 3 inches long. It is the current state record holder. Mike Cottingham had to have several other men help him hoist the state record gator on shore.

It took Tres Ammerman of Orlando, Fla., nearly two hours to reel in this mammoth gator, which weighed 654 pounds and broke the state record in length at 14 feet, 3.5 inches. The Florida record for weight belongs to the 1989 hunter who killed a 1,043 pound gator at Orange Lake.

Tim Stroh, 19, from Florida, killed this 12-foot, 3-inch, 800 pound gator in 2011. He reported that he hauled it up near his boat with a standard bass fishing rod and then shot it. He showed off his gator with his girlfriend.