Three Mississippi alligator hunters were on the water after midnight on August 28 searching for what turned out to be an absolutely massive gator. They were on an unidentified river in Mississippi’s West Central Zone on the opening of the state-sanctioned alligator hunting season.
John Raines of Ripley, Mississippi, had the state gator tag. His two buddies Morgan Perkins and Ben Holcomb accompanied him that night in Raines’ 18-foot aluminum boat.
The tag allowed Raines to take one gator under 7 feet long, plus a second gator as big as they could find.
“We got a smaller gator just under 7-feet long earlier that evening, then started looking for a big one,” Holcomb tells Outdoor Life. “About 2 a.m. we spotted a nice 10-foot gator and went after him, but he went down. We were looking for him with our spotlights to pop back up, then we spotted a much bigger gator so headed for him.”
They could just see the second big gator’s head, and they cast a heavy-duty treble hook from a rod and reel spooled with 100-pound-test braided line. They snagged the gator, then began an epic three-hour nighttime battle.
“We hauled on him for 45 minutes waiting for him to come up, to put a second hook in him,” says Holcomb, 28. “But he got tangled in brush and broke the 100-pound braided line.”
Holcomb says the gator eventually surfaced and they cast a second treble hook with 100-pound braid, snagging the creature again. But again the gator wrapped in river brush and broke off.
“That gator broke off three different times before we finally got another hook in it,” he says. “The last time the gator went straight to the bottom and we waited an hour before it came back up for air. We were pulling on him the whole time with that big rod and reel.”
When the gator surfaced they tossed a 20/0 treble hook connected to a rope over the gator and snagged it.
“We hauled on him, and he was starting to tire, and we got him close,” Holcomb says. “His tail came up out of the water and slammed the side of our boat, and I yelled ‘Get the gun!’”
They shot the gator in the neck at the base of its head with a 12-gauge shotgun. Then they lashed the massive reptile to their boat and headed toward shore to better secure it.
“But I looked at his eyes and they started to move, and so did his legs, so we shot him again,” Holcomb says. “That first shot must have just knocked him out, but the second shot finished him.”
They towed the gator to shore, and using a winch and pully system the hunters were able to load it into a pickup truck. It was there they saw their gator was missing one leg, likely lost in a fight years earlier with another huge alligator.
Then they took their gator to Yazoo City where staff at Red Antler Processing took care of the animal. It measured 13-feet, 7-inches, and weighed 676 pounds.
Their gator is a swamp dinosaur by any measure. But it’s short of the Mississippi record of 14 feet, 3 inches, weighing 802.5 pounds. That alligator was taken in 2023 also in Mississippi’s West Central gator hunting zone.
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“We had the gator processed, and I’m going to have a full-body mount of it made by a taxidermist in Atlanta who’s gonna drive down and pick up its hide and head,” Holcomb says. “It’s expensive to mount at $12,000. But I told John and Morgan that if we got one over 13 feet long I’d have it mounted. It’s a once in a lifetime gator.”
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