David Hanson, 59, of Swartz, Louisiana had a group of four Oklahoma gator hunters with him the morning of Sept. 22. They headed out onto Louisiana’s Little Tensas Bayou, checking baited hooks that Hanson had set for gators the previous day. Hanson has been guiding Louisiana alligator hunters for years, but on this day his clients would take one of the biggest gators ever seen in the state.
“I put fresh liver baits on the hooks, and I figured that would get some of the big gators around in that area,” Hanson tells Outdoor Life. “The baits sat out overnight, and we checked them the next morning.”
They’d set up in a motherlode of alligators, says Hanson, eventually getting eight different giant lizards for the Oklahoma men that day.
“I have a new 18-foot Phoenix airboat that’s 8 feet wide, and we had to make several trips out and back because we couldn’t handle so many gators at one time,” says Hanson. “They ranged from 8 feet up, and when we went to check one baited line I knew it was a huge gator.”
Hanson uses special line for big gators that he calls “Mule Tape.” It’s 1,800-pound test flat line tied to a baited 14/0 hook.
“We got to that big gator about 9:30 a.m., and I knew it was a giant bull gator,” he says. “Brandon Crossley was the hunter, and we all put on safety glasses when he used my .357 revolver to shoot it.”
Hanson says just one pistol shot was all it took to dispatch the big gator. But getting it into the boat was an all-hands chore for the hunters, who used a specially made Zook gaff to haul and maneuver the beast.
“It was dead, but I tapped its mouth closed for safety,” Hanson says. “Then we worked for a while to get that big boy into my airboat. We couldn’t get his huge head up, so we worked on one leg in at a time, then rolled him aboard.”
Once the giant gator was in Hanson’s boat – which he calls the “Swamp Donkey” – they ran to a boat launch and trailered it. When they got back to their home base at Cypress Point Hunting Lodge, they needed a tractor to lift the giant out of their airboat.
“I called my father-in-law Richard Zimmerman to bring his tractor to lift the gator up and out of my boat,” says Hanson. “Once we had it lifted up we measured its length at 14 feet, 6 inches.”
They also measured the gator’s length while it lay flat on the ground, and it measured the same.
“We called the Louisiana wildlife folks, and they witnessed the measuring of the gator to document it,” says Hanson. “Louisiana doesn’t keep official records of alligators, like Florida does. But Safari Club International does, and according to their records it ranks in the all-time top five in record length.”
The longest SCI recorded gator is a 15-foot, 9-inch, 1,011-pounder taken from the Alabama River in 2014.
The 14-foot, 6-inch, estimated 700-pound Louisiana gator just taken by Hanson’s client Brandon Crossley ranks number 4 by SCI. It just edges out the now number 5 SCI gator taken in 2010 by Robert Ammerman from Lake Washington, Florida.
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“That big gator is going to be made into a full-size mount by a taxidermist and shipped to Brandon in Oklahoma,” Hanson says with a chuckle. “I guess he has a place big enough to put a ‘swamp donkey’ like that one.
“That 14-footer was so big, that when we skinned it out we found a 4-foot-long gator inside that it had eaten… They do eat their young.”
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