Man who caught 750-pound gator: 'We needed a bigger boat'
Two Florida alligator hunters unexpectedly caught the massive reptile.
Two Florida alligator hunters went out recently looking for an 8-foot gator to bring home, but what they ended up catching instead left them amazed.
“We've been wanting to catch one for his hide and eat him and we didn't realize that we were going to get one home so big,” Brandon Barfield told ABC News.
But to call the duo's haul big is an understatement. Barfield and his partner Brandon Cutchins caught a 12-foot-long, 750-pound alligator in Gulf County on Sunday morning.
The two spotted the gator at 3:30 a.m., and proceeded to follow it for the next four hours.
"It took over 30 minutes and then we were able to harpoon the alligator and then we were able to get some big grapple hooks onto the alligator,” Barfield, 24, said. “And then we were able to kill the alligator with our bang sticks.”
Around 8 a.m., the two men managed to get the gator into their possession.
Barfield has only gone out four times to hunt for alligators. This is the first time he succeeded in actually catching the reptile, and it happened to be a giant one.
“We didn't think he was going to be that big. We thought it was going to be about 9 foot, maybe 10 foot at the absolute biggest,” Barfield said.
“We were super stoked to be able to get an alligator that size.”
However, catching an animal of that size had a slight drawback. The gator was too big to fit in their boat. So the two men had to tow the reptile on the one side of the boat. It took them an hour and a half to get it to the boat ramp.
“When we finally got the alligator to the boat, we realized we needed a bigger boat,” Barfield said.
“We had to tow his hip on the side of the boat back to the boat ramp,” he explained.
Eventually, the gator was brought back to Bay County to be processed.
Barfield and his hunting partner were lucky that day, he said. But he's not sure if they are going to get another gator anytime soon, he added.
“You're not going to catch a gator like this every single day,” he said. “I got very lucky.”