ST. PETERSBURG TIMES (Florida) 01 July 05 Teen bloodied but unbowed by gator bite - A youth fends off an attack during a late-night dip in Lake Saxon. But he vows to continue swimming there. The gator will be killed. (Seung Min Kim)
Land O'lakes: It was supposed to be just another late-night boat ride on Lake Saxon.
Blake Hutchinson, mother Linda and some friends were on the lake lit only by the moon. Only 20 yards from his Land O'Lakes home, Hutchinson dipped below the water for a quick swim, holding the side of the boat with one arm.
Hutchinson, 19, assumed the splashes he heard were coming from nearby fish.
He was wrong.
An alligator, almost as long as Hutchinson's 6-foot-2 body, popped up next to him. His friends and mother, tucked safely inside the boat a couple of feet away from the thrashing Hutchinson, could do nothing to help during the roughly 15-second fight.
Hutchinson eventually pried the alligator's mouth open to free his hand, pushed the gator and quickly climbed inside the boat.
"The alligators will take you underwater, and that's what I was really worried about," he said. "I had to do something to get away."
As a Florida native, Hutchinson has encountered alligators before. But never in a way that resulted in his left hand, from the thumb to the pointer finger, being chewed up, and his right hand swollen, with deep gashes by the thumb.
The most painful injury of all: a wound on his right thumbnail that swelled so badly that Hutchinson had to cut through the nail with a knife in an attempt to relieve the pain.
"It felt like a hammer was pounding on my nail," Huthchinson said. "I was dying."
Hutchinson went to his family doctor for a series of X-rays later that day, but the pain persisted, and he was admitted into St. Joseph's Children's Hospital in Tampa.
The early Monday encounter was the first reported incident in Pasco County this year in which an alligator injured a human, said Greg Morse, spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission in Lakeland.
Until Hutchinson's tussle with the reptile early Monday, the last nonfatal human-alligator encounter in the county involved Peter Hawley in 2002, who was bitten while trying to free an alligator who was stuck in a fence.
Of the 23 fatal alligator attacks reported to the commission since the first death in 1957, none have occurred in Pasco County. All alligator complaints and attacks are required to be reported to the commission.
The commission fields about 15,000 alligator complaints annually from across the state, but most are general nuisance reports, and incidents involving injuries remain rare, Morse said.
As of Thursday, Hutchinson was in good condition at the hospital.
Meanwhile, the gator in question has not been captured, mostly because descriptions of the reptile conflict. But once trappers locate the alligator, it will be killed, Morse said.
"We're at county capacity and there is no place to put an alligator where it won't have to outcompete other alligators, because they are very territorial animals," he said. "It doesn't serve the public interest nor the interest of other alligators involved to put a nuisance alligator somewhere else."
The commission's Web site at www.myfwc.com provides a wealth of tips for alligator safety, but the big tips include avoiding feeding the reptiles, fencing yards and leaving the gators intact in their natural habitat.
Because of the bacteria that festers inside an alligator's mouth, Morse urges those attacked by one to seek treatment immediately.
Unfortunately, Hutchinson didn't.
"Doctors said it could have been stitched up if I came in earlier, but it didn't seem that bad to me at the time."
Hutchinson is awaiting the official word from doctors on any permanent injuries, but his fingers dodged possible paralysis, he said.
Now, the once-mangled phalanges are slowly beginning to heal, and the gashes are starting to close. The hours being hooked up to an IV and soaking his hands in a special disinfectant four times a day have started to mend the wounds.
No fingers were sprained or broken, and he sustained no other injuries aside from the gashes and punctures to his hands.
"Stuff like this doesn't cross your mind at all," said Hutchinson, a 2004 Land O'Lakes High graduate who is studying criminal justice at Southwest Florida College. "I'm pretty lucky."
But as soon as he leaves St. Joseph's - which he is expected to do in the next day or so, expect him back at Lake Saxon. He said he's definitely not cowering away from the lake he has swum and splashed in a thousand times before.
"I'm looking forward to going back into the water," he said. "I think I was just in a bad place at the bad time. It was probably my fault, but this is probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing."
Teen bloodied but unbowed by gator bite