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Gator trapper hauls in whopper
By ROBIN MITCHELL
© St. Petersburg Times, Charles Fagan knew the next day would be special as he gored a chunk of beef on the 6/0 grouper hook. "I got back to the house and told my dad I'd seen 12 and more alligators," the 34-year-old Dade City trapper said. "All of them big." What he caught the next morning was a keeper, an 880-pound leviathan hatched during the administration of President Harry S. Truman. The 13-foot, 11 1/4-inch alligator was the third-longest wild gator on record and the second-heaviest ever killed in the state, state wildlife biologist Arnold Brunell said. "It was just about 101 percent alligator, about as perfect as you get," said Fagan. Not a scar on him, and all there except for "oh, maybe a half-inch or so of his tail." It's not that the rest of the haul on Sept. 19 was anything to scoff at. Of the 21 hooks baited on the Kovacs Brothers ranch just south of Mulberry in Polk County, 16 yielded alligators. One was 13 feet 8, another 13 feet 4, and one 12 feet 9. "The rest," said Fagan, were 7- to 9-footers -- "all good healthy alligators." Fagan, a professional alligator rancher, and friend Jon Ackley spent an hour in a tug of war with the reptile at the ranch about 10 miles west of Bartow. They had the animal tethered by a 12-yard, 3/16th-inch nylon rope attached to a half-inch-diameter iron bar hammered into the ground. They played the gator like a game fish. "I got a few rope burns here and there," Fagan said. When the exhausted gator became entangled in vegetation, Fagan shot it with a .22-caliber rifle. The ranch, just one of a number of similar tracts where Fagan leases alligator hunting rights, includes reclaimed phosphate mine pits stocked with tilapia as food for the alligators. Under a state private wetlands alligator harvest program, the alligators may be hunted nearly all year, Fagan said. The hunting season on public lands is just five weeks long. The longest alligator caught in Florida was a 14-foot, 5/8-inch, 800-pound reptile taken from Lake Monroe in 1997, Brunell said. The heaviest alligator weighed 1,043 pounds, was 13 feet 101/2 and was killed on Orange Lake in 1989. Though he ranches alligators for a living, he's keeping this hide and massive skull. This one's different from the thousands he has captured since he was 11 years old. The meat, more than 200 pounds from the tail, will be sold. "In this business, you're never going to be a millionaire and you may lose a few fingers and toes," he said, "but I'd rather be going out after an alligator than anything." -- The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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From the Times state desk
From the state wire
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