Most hunting weekends, showering is strictly optional and, frankly, a little frowned upon. Sissies with their soaps and shampoos. Not so with gator hunting. Between the summer heat sweating, bug spray, rotten bait residue, bangstick-ed blood splatter, and handling the overall wretchedness of a swamp lizard, bathing becomes a necessity even in this basest of social situations. I couldn’t wait to hit the showers last Saturday after helping Sarah punch out two gators. What washed off me would gag a maggot. Such is life for gator hunters, though.
Sarah’s first gator wasn’t huge – 7-feet, 7-inches, if I recall – but, man, plenty feisty. A younger female, she’d swallowed the rotten chicken bait and descended into a deep that only submarines could reach. At least that’s how it felt trying to snag her. For 30+ minutes, handlines or snatch rods, it was a fool’s errand trying to stick a treble hook in her hide at that depth. Frustrating and exhausting in the morning’s advancing sun.
With larger gators circling, including a beast who’d already broken us off once, we made the call to horse her to the surface. If she spit the bait, so be it. Harris heaved her topside, and Kurt whacked her with the harpoon. Promptly brought along boatside, Sarah blasted the gator with precise touch. First gator on deck.
That second gator had pounced on an earlier bait. He threw a wake intercepting the floating rotten chicken. A quick jig of the line and he inhaled the offering. Unfortunately, he beelined into thick willows and cut the PowerPro. When we saw him reappear, we didn’t recognize it as the same critter. I hurriedly stuck my gloveless hands in the bait bucket to re-rig a line to deploy, obviously regretting that within moments. Describing that stink exceeds the power of vocabulary, though persistent is a fine adjective as, despite multiple handwashings, it reanimates on your bare skin throughout the day. Gag, puke, vomit. Sarah regretted it, too, as I passed the chicken-slimed rod to her when we noticed the gator was trailing the paracord from the original bait he’d gulped.
With ample paracord snaking along the surface, we were actually able to sneak up and re-attach to the gator. Again, he led us to the willows. We could see a slide along the bank he probably used. And, again, the gator was too deep to harpoon or snatch, the tangle of willow branches preventing any realistic chance of the latter.
Long story short, he earned his liberty. We cleared the willows and prospected the waters around where we thought he’d swam. Time was running low on the morning. On a desperation cast, I stuck my hook into something large on the bottom. Harris moved to the bow with me. This gator would be ours if he could put the handline in the reptile.
Instead, the reptile popped up off the stern like Jaws as I was bent over wrestling a log or rock or sunken ship or whatever it was that wasn’t the gator. This time, the bull headed for open water and towards a shoreline blessedly free of line-fouling debris. I shook my line free, and we pursued him across a channel. In a few feet of water, he resurfaced, and I looped the hook over his back and into his hide. Harris quickly followed up with the handline, and Kurt harpooned. Sarah, once more, drove home a great shot with the bangstick.
Nearly out of steam, we rolled the 10-foot, 11-inch bull into the boat. A water to hydrate, a beer to celebrate for the gator hunters. Back on dry land, we dropped the gators at a processor. Covered in blood, grime, and slime. The smell of success, but a smell that warranted that well-deserved shower.