Alligator hunters often use harpoons to land gators that are already hooked and near the boat, but this viral video from a hunt in Florida shows a quicker and much bolder approach. The man in the clip, Andrew Wooten, is seen running after a huge alligator on a sandbar with a harpoon in his hand. Wooten catches up with the 13-plus-foot gator as it speeds across the bar, throws his spear into its back, and then grabs ahold of the attached rope as the alligator takes off swimming.
“I wasn’t expecting it,” says Kristy Grant, Wooten’s partner, who recorded the video. “I’m thinking [the gator is] going to make a run for the water, and we’ll snag him with a treble hook, but Andrew took off running within a second of seeing it. It was so fast.”
Grant, who owns Sporty Girl Apparel and has been hunting alligators for 20 years, says the harpoon hunt took place in October 2019. The video she took of Wooten surfaced on Instagram last year, where it got more than 40 million views on another page. Grant re-shared her video Monday and spoke with Outdoor Life to tell the full story behind the hunt.
“We’d seen a lot of 11-footers and we saw him [the 13-footer] the night before. He was a giant and I knew I wanted that one,” Grant tells OL. “A bird’s nest happened when Andrew casted and that stopped the treble hook less than a foot in front of the gator. He went under and never came back up.”
The couple returned to the same area the next morning. The pulled their boat onto the bank to quietly watch the foggy river. Behind them, off the main channel, was a swampy pond with less than a foot of water in it. The big gator was lying there, and they heard the splash when it got up.
“We were watching the river where we thought it would come out of the willows,” she explains. “We figured we’d see him cruising back and forth, swimming … but he was behind us in that little pond. He saw us and knew he had to get to deep water to be safe. If he hadn’t moved, we would have never seen him.”
When the gator moved, so did Wooten. He jumped out of the boat carrying a harpoon affixed with a rope and buoy. After running down the fleeing gator, Wooten hit his mark with the spear and then fought the big reptile for about an hour. Grant finished the 13.5-foot gator with a bang stick and filled her tag.
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Grant says Wooten harvested two other 13-foot alligators during the 2019 season. She also tagged an 11-footer that year. She says Wooten has drawn tags every year since.
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