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. Link -via Digg