FLORIDA TODAY (Melbourne) 19 August 06 Hunters nab gargantuan gators - Alligator season began on Tuesday (Jim Waymer)
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.
Jerry Serna's son-in-law, George Warthen, and his friends Mike Ciaccia, and Todd Wessling -- all three are college students in Florida -- took turns reeling the brute in.
They made the kill with a bang stick at about 4 a.m.
Ryan Farley, 20, of Palm Bay, harpooned his first gator this week, also an 11-footer, after five years yearning for such a hunt. "Once I got wind of it, I've been dying to do it," Farley said.
It took several harpoon throws to land the thick-skinned reptile. "The first two actually bounced off him, his hide was so thick," Farley said.
The gator slammed and bit their boat, but lost its nearly hourlong fight.
Farley took the meat to be processed. "The day I get it, I'm going to have a little fry up," he said.
Usually, from 7,000 to 8,000 alligators are killed during the annual hunts, state wildlife officials said. The state is thought to number from 1 million to 2 million alligators.
"It's looking pretty good," Tony Young, a spokesman for Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said of the season so far.
Serna plans a full-body mount of his once-in-a-lifetime catch. He'll return to hunt this weekend to use his final alligator tag.
"The kids have to get back to school, and I gotta catch up on my sleep," he said.
Hunters nab gargantuan gators