[Valigator]

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August 19, 2006


Hunters nab gargantuan gators

Alligator season began on Tuesday

BY JIM WAYMER
FLORIDA TODAY

Hunters snagged gargantuan gators and adrenaline rushes this week throughout East Central Florida.

Jerry Serna got his in the wee hours of Friday, when he, his son-in-law and three other men tugged for 31/2 hours to pull in an 11-foot-long alligator that laid claim to a piece of Lake Monroe in Volusia County.

"The girth is what makes it so massive," said Serna of Malabar, who helped reel in the prehistoric beast with a snag hook.

It was one among many behemoth gators landed the fourth day of Florida's annual alligator hunt.

Serna knew it was there.

Over the past few months, the gator would turn to intimidate Serna's mother, Joyce, whenever she fished from a boat about 200 yards offshore, in an area called Whisky Hammock.

Not any more. The fat gator now lay upside down in a fridge west of Melbourne.

"We've been seeing this gator for the past three nights," said Serna, an integrated science teacher at Stone Middle School in Melbourne.

Serna estimates the gator weighs 400 to 500 pounds and was about 30 years old. It was the seventh of eight alligator tags the group bought for this hunting season, which started Tuesday and runs through Nov. 1. Hunters must pick one week to hunt within the first month of the season to stagger the effort on state waters. After that, if
they still have tags left, they can hunt any time until season's end.

They spotted it early Friday, around 12:30 a.m. They cast a spin reel with a snatch hook on 50-pound test line. The gator at one point broke loose, but floated up like a whale, tired. Adam Young, a student with at Florida State University, snagged it again, this time with line that could withstand 100 pounds of pull.