On the night of August 31, four experienced gator hunters set out in a 16-foot aluminum boat on central Mississippi’s Ross Barnett Reservoir.
“We started out in the lake at the mouth of the Pearl River looking for an alligator at least 11-feet long,” alligator tag holder Joe Wyrick tells Outdoor Life. “The area isn’t very well known for gators. But pretty quick that night we spotted a smaller one. As we started for it, my pal Hunter saw another bigger gator hiding near a log.
“Hunter’s a long-experienced gator hunter, and he turned to me and says, ‘that’s a big one, we need to go for it.’”
Wyrick says the big gator went underwater as they approached it. So, the hunters waited until it came back up before making their next move.
On board the boat that night were: Wyrick from Coldwater, Miss., 13-year-old Ryan Ragsdale (Wyrick’s son), Camron Massey of Hernando, Miss., and Hunter Parrett of Weir, Miss.
They all waited and watched for the big gator to rise to the surface.
“He came up close to our boat, and we made a cast to it with a weighted 10/0 treble snag hook and got him on the first try,” says Wyrick, 42, a career truck driver who also owns Joe’s Wildlife Taxidermy. “That gator fought better than any fish I’ve ever caught. Tougher than amberjacks or sharks, just brutal and strong. It was a dragon-size gator.”
Wyrick battled the beast with a Calcutta rod and 100-pound test braided line with no leader. He says he fought the gator for only about five minutes close to the boat, then Parrett got another line on the big lizard.
“We all worked together as a team so Hunter could use a big hook like a flying gaff fitted to a rope in it,” Wyrick says. “The gator was spinning and thrashing, getting wrapped up in the lines. That’s when my 100-pound test fishing line to my rod broke. It was a good thing we had ropes and other lines on it.
“Everything came together just perfect for us. The whole hunt didn’t take more than 20 minutes.”
The hunters put a noose around the gator’s head and neck. When it was worn completely out, they shot the animal in the head with a .410 shotgun and No. 6 shot.
“It sounds like a .410 is too light for a giant gator, but that .410 with No. 6s at close range is just like a shotgun rifled slug,” Wyrick says. “That .410 is deadly.”
The giant gator was nearly impossible to load into the hunters’ boat.
“There was another boat of gator hunters on the lake that night, and they came over to help us get that dragon into our boat,” Wyrick says. “I don’t think we could have got that done without their help. It took all hands to get that gator up and in our boat.”
The hunters slowly motored up the Pearl River to the Sunset Grill, where a competition for the biggest gator was being held. They offloaded their giant alligator there, where it was measured at 13.5 feet.
The beast was not weighed on an official scale, but the experienced gator hunters estimated that it was between 650 to 700 pounds.
Wyrick’s gator falls short of the longest or heaviest ever to taken in Mississippi. The state record-length gator is 14-feet, 3-inches, taken in September 2023 that weighed 802.5 pounds.
In August of this year, Tom Grant and a team of hunters took a 13.15-foot Mississippi gator that weighed 697.5 pounds.
Read Next: ‘It About Snatched Me Out of the Boat.’ Hunters Tag Giant Gator That’s Nearly a State Record
“Our gator was just too heavy to handle well,” says Wyrick. “Once we put it on the dock at the Sunset Grill, we couldn’t hardly move it. So we ran our boat back to where we launched it. Then we loaded the boat back onto its trailer, and drove back to Sunset Grill. We launched the boat again there so we could get it beside the dock and roll the gator back into our boat.”
Once the hunters had the gator back in their boat they packed ice all around it, and drove the beast to Wyrick’s home.
Friends and family helped Wyrick skin the gator and process its meat, which is frozen and ready to eat in the weeks and months to come.
“I’ve got the skin salted and in a freezer, plus a whole lot of gator meat,” says Wyrick. “My wife Allee and my buddy Josh Lindsey who owns a processing business really helped a lot.
“I’m going to personally mount the gator head. And we’re trying to figure out where to hang that big gator hide once it’s tanned… Gonna be tough to find a wall big enough to handle it.”
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