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LUFKIN DAILY NEWS (Texas) 24 September 07 Lufkin man and three friends bag 880-pound, 13-foot, 10 1/2-inch-long gator near Trinity (Stacy Faison)
They say everything's bigger in Texas, and apparently alligators are no exception.
A Lufkin man and three of his friends have a potential state record on their hands after capturing a gargantuan gator Friday morning near Trinity.
Justin Wells of Lufkin, Tom Bass of Dallas, Jarrett Hanus of Spring and Ryan Haltom of Houston set the baits together Thursday night at the Gospel Ranch, which is about five miles outside of Trinity.
"It was the experience of a lifetime, and I'm glad (Ryan) took me out there on it," said Wells, a Lufkin High School graduate and SFA forestry student. "I don't think we'll ever catch one bigger than that."
"We'd gotten word back in the spring time that there was a big gator out there," said Haltom, a wildlife biologist and land management consultant, "so me and Tommy had gone out there several times and scouted and seen quite a bit of gator activity and videotapes of gators."
Ranch manager Larry Denson had spotted the big gator, prompting them to get tags for the season, and Thursday night was just "kind of a last-minute deal before the season was over," Haltom said.
Using the hook-and-line method, the group anchored a rope to a tree, left enough rope so the gator could run with it, and hung a 14-ought treble hook about a foot above the water with their own "secret recipe of chicken and some other stuff."
"We can't let too many secrets out of the bag," Haltom said.
When they showed up Friday morning, they had a line in the water, but when they started pulling on it, it was tangled. Not knowing whether the gator was dead or alive, the four slowly made their way through the 6- to 7-foot-deep water to untangle the gator and tie some ropes around him to drag him out. But they quickly discovered it wasn't going to be that easy.
"He drowned himself," Wells said. "We believe he just dove underneath the water and got tangled up in a stump, and gators have to come up for air every 15 minutes, so we were pretty sure he was dead, but we still weren't sure."
"Once we figured out he was dead and he wasn't going to get us," Haltom said, "we started diving down and feeling on him and we realized he was big. We could stand on top of him and we were head and shoulders above the water. That's when we knew he had to be a big guy.
"The scales kind of change. On his belly there's big, slick scales, or tiles, and as you get toward their mouth it gets into some softer leather, and we got to feeling around and thought, 'OK, this is his mouth.' But when we got to tying him up, we realized it wasn't his mouth — it was his leg."
They broke a 400-pound test rope before realizing that "a truck and a rope wouldn't do it," eventually enlisting the help of a tractor and some chains to finally get the gator out of the water. Next it was off to ranch headquarters to clean him up, hang him for a measurement by Texas Parks and Wildlife, then place him in the bed of a truck filled with ice for the trip to the taxidermist for a full life-size mount.
"You couldn't tell what we had in the bed of the truck because we had a ton of ice on him," Haltom said. "We went and cleaned Brookshire Brothers out. We had 400 pounds of ice on him."
"I get excited right now just thinking about it," Haltom said. "When I reached down there and grabbed that claw and we got to looking at each other, we were jumping around, high-fiving, and we were actually saying the words, 'state record.'"
The gator wound up weighing in at 13 feet, 101/2 inches long and 880 pounds. And while they don't know yet whether their gator is an official state record — "Until I see it on a piece of paper from Parks and Wildlife, I'm just going to say it's a potential," Haltom said — the guys had some heavy celebrating to take care of over the weekend.
"We immediately drove to Houston and went to Beeville to go dove hunting and celebrate," Haltom said. "And we were tired puppies, let me tell you.
"It's going to be in the record books. We just don't know if it's going to be the state (hook-and-line) record."
"Not knowing what we were getting into when we were walking into the water, it was an adrenaline rush," Wells said, "and when we finally figured out how big it was, you just can't even describe the feeling."
Although Haltom said the four set the baits together and worked to get the gator out, Bass will be written down as the hunter. Once the mount is done, the guys intend to donate it to a museum or find some place to display it.
Lufkin man and three friends bag 880-pound, 13-foot, 10 1/2-inch-long gator near Trinity

LUFKIN DAILY NEWS (Texas) 27 September 07 Gator creates big buzz but no state record (Stacy Faison)
He became water-cooler talk, the subject of Internet message boards, and generated more than 60 comments on The Lufkin Daily News Web site. But he's no state record.
Texas Parks and Wildlife Department officials confirmed on Thursday that the 13-foot, 10 1/2-inch-long alligator captured by a Lufkin man and three of his friends last weekend is "not even going to be close," according to Shawn Willis, a Lufkin wildlife biologist with TPWD.
"There's been two that were 14-foot-4-inches and at least one that was 13-foot-11-inches in the past," he said, "so he's going to be at least fourth or fifth."
Willis said that in the last 10 years alone, there have been three or four gators harvested that were bigger than the 880-pounder Justin Wells of Lufkin captured Friday morning in Chalk Creek, on the Gospel Ranch near Trinity, along with friends Tom Bass, Jarrett Hanus and Ryan Haltom.
Monique Slaughter, a natural resource specialist with the TPWD's Alligator Program based out of the Port Arthur office, confirmed that the Texas state record is 14 feet 4 inches long, shared by two gators in two different years, one harvested in Jackson County and the other in Calhoun County. And Willis said a 13-foot, 11-inch gator was harvested in Victoria County in 2000.
"During the spring season, we've already had five 13-footers," Slaughter said, "which is usually more than we get in the fall season."
But Slaughter said the four men who captured the Trinity gator should be proud.
"It's pretty dang big," she said.
Slaughter said the Alligator Program manages wild harvest, spring nuisance alligators and alligator farming, where "pretty much they ranch alligators for hide and meat and put them on the market."
"Gators are still highly regulated," she said. "They're under the CITES (Convention of International Trade and Endangered Species) Program. This is the first year that it's really become very liberalized."
She said there is a spring season in the non-core counties — "so rural or urban that there's really a low tolerance of alligators" — during which time licensed hunters are allowed one alligator per hunter from April 1 through June 30.
The regular season is in the fall, which is "much more of a commercial management-type harvest, where tags are issued to land owners who have an alligator habitat."
That season is for the core counties, which include Angelina, Brazoria, Calhoun, Chambers, Galveston, Hardin, Jackson, Jasper, Jefferson, Liberty, Matagorda, Nacogdoches, Newton, Orange, Polk, Refugio, Sabine, San Augustine, San Jacinto, Trinity, Tyler and Victoria counties, and runs from Sept. 10 through Sept. 30.
"And so annually we do a survey along the coast to determine how many tags we're going to issue," Slaughter said, "and we've been hunting alligators since '81, thereabout."
A PDF file of rules and regulations, how to cook alligator, a list of buyers, hunting methods and more is available at the TPWD Web site at www.tpwd.state.tx.us (click on regulations, then on alligators).
"For the spring season, since so many people were not familiar with how to do this, we set up a little orientation for them," Slaughter said. "And some people would say it's a lot like fishing, because you're setting your bait out."
Slaughter said the TPWD would not know where the Trinity gator ranks in the record books until they have received all the data on the gator and the capture.
Gator creates big buzz but no state record