“Snaggletooth” has finally been caught after four years. And was a tall order, even for experienced hunters.
A four-man team in South Carolina pulled in the 844-pound, 14-foot alligator from Lake Moultrie on Sept. 28 during the state’s alligator hunting season, The Post and Courier OF Charleston reported. The huge reptile was the second largest alligator caught in the Palmetto State.
Around 11 p.m. ET on Sept. 28, Cole Poplin and William Ard from Renegade Bowfishing, along with clients Chris Webb -- the tag holder -- and his father, Craig Webb, captured the alligator, which had been elusive for years.
“I spotted this gator four years ago, roughly,” Poplin, who runs the fishing charter company, told the newspaper. “I’m hunting gators every single night, taking clients out every single night. I’ve hunted this gator a lot over the last three or four years. Four years later, we have a magical night, and he just happened to slip up and make a mistake, and we made it count.”
Cole Poplin said he has seen the alligator during the off-season from hunting. This year’s hunting season began on Sept. 12 and runs through Oct. 10, The Post and Courier.
While huge, Snaggletooth does not own the state record. That belongs to a 1,025-pound, 13-foot monster caught in 2010 by Massachusetts resident Maryellen Mara-Christian, also from Lake Moultrie, The Berkeley Independent reported.
Cole Poplin said the group missed several chances to corral the gator, and when they finally did capture the reptile, it took three men to lift it out of the water.
“We actually panicked and missed him twice. (We had to) regroup, got back on him, made it happen, got some lines in him,” Poplin told News Nation. “Two full-grown men could not, without him even fighting us, could not pick him up off the bottom. It took three people to raise him just to get him off the bottom before we could do something with him.”
WJCL reported that the measurements were not independently verified by the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources.
But whatever size is verified, it was a very big catch.