Florida Man Takes Down Monstrous 719-Pound Alligator, Wrestles It Bare-Handed

Ashley Schaeffer BMW11 years ago

Admittedly, I’ve been terrified of alligators since poor Chubs lost his hand to one of them in 1996, when I was just eight years old. Even though most of my golf these days is played in the mid-Atlantic region, I’m still ever vigilant for the pesky reptiles every time I’m near a water hazard, and it’s suffice to say if I ever saw a behemoth like this monster recently taken down in Florida, well, let’s just say I would be running fast as fuck in any direction that was away from it.

Clark Woodsby, a native of Orlando, took down the massive, nearly 13-foot long gator, but not after wrestling it into submission first…which is crazy to think, because it weighed 719 fucking pounds.

From WTSP:

A Lakeland man had a big wrestling match on Sunday night as he caught a 719-pound alligator in a private phosphate pit south of Bartow.

“We called him in with an electronic call,” Clark Woodsby told The Lakeland Ledger. “This gator heard it from across the lake, and it came bee-lining right toward me.

“When it got within about 20 yards, we turned the call off. I shot it with a crossbow right in the shoulder.”

Only a crossbow to try to take this enormous thing down!?

The beast at hand is literally big enough to potentially be kin of the monstrosity that played the clock tower alligator in Hook, and you only have a crossbow!?

“It was technically 12 feet, 10 inches, but there was about 4 inches of tail missing because of a fight, according to the trapper I went with,” he said.

Yeah, since technicalities matter when we’re talking about whether it was a 13-foot or almost 13-foot alligator that ate me for dinner. No way, no how would you ever find me in the same zip code as that thing.

Woodsby was hunting with Glen Grizzaffe of Winter Haven, a licensed trapper who owns an alligator processing business in Plant City. The landowner called them to take care of the gator; that was considered a nuisance.

After shooting the crossbow, with its string attached to a buoy, Woodsby and Grizzaffe managed to get a snatch hook with a heavier-gauge rope into the gator, and after pulling on it for an hour got the animal into a 14-foot jonboat.

After finally wrestling it on to the boat, Woodsby says he shot his trophy in the head with a .357 Magnum.

I suppose we’ve got to tip the cap for the public service that Clark performed here, because there’s no way I’d want that thing running around in my backyard when I hit retirement age forty years down the road. Good God almighty..

[via WTSP]

Images via DailyMail