BLUE CYPRESS LAKE– With the close to gator season one more day away, Mayor Susan Adams and her friends spent the night before Halloween searching one last time for a monster.
They piled into a pontoon boat and set off across Blue Cypress Lake – baited three buoys and sat back and waited.
“I’d never done it before,” Susan said of gator hunting before this season. “By no means am I an expert gator hunter. I don’t even pretend to be. I’m probably one of those weekend warriors that the real gator hunters go crazy about.” Susan and others had gone out a few times during the season, sometimes coming home with a gator – sometimes not.
This night – the second to last night of the season – they went home with a 7-foot-3 1/2-inch alligator.
It wasn’t exactly a monster, but it would do.
“The whole point is to go out there and bring something back,” Susan said. “To be able to go hunting and be successful first of all is not something that happens every single time you go out.”
“There’s a lot of waiting,” she added.
At about 9 p.m., an hour and a half or so into the hunt on Blue Cypress, one of their milk jug-buoys fell to the water, something had snagged the raw chicken stuffed in a knee-high nylon.
All eyes were fixed to the yellow glow stick-lit jug bobbing in the water.
It was on the move.
Jay Davey and Leo Feeley readied the harpoon and bang stick. Leo’s wife, Angela, grabbed their puppy and went to the back of the pontoon to stay out of the way. The boat’s occupants went silent as it approached the buoy.
It took a couple tries before Leo snatched the bait line and began to pull it up. But as soon as the line drew taut, whatever was at the watery end of the rope jetted off, pulling the rope from Leo’s hand.
The chase was on with Danny Emmons at the helm.
Lights flashed on, searching for the telltale eyes of a surfaced gator. No luck. Leo tried again to tug the line. For a second time, the buoy raced across the water.
“They swim fast,” Jay had said before the hunt, “faster than you think.”
Finally, Leo caught hold of the rope and brought it up hand over hand. Just as the gator neared the water’s surface, it let go the bait and escaped.
Leo was left holding onto a mass of raw chicken, stripped of its pantyhose casing. Silence.
For a few moments, no one on the boat moved, much less spoke. Leo tried in vain to cast a hook for the lucky gator. Though not catching the reptile, he snagged a piece of tree stump – which for a moment gave the hunters hope that the gator maybe wasn’t as lucky as they thought.
Danny piloted the pontoon across the water once again so Jay and Leo could reset the bait. Then they waited.
And waited.
At about midnight – after nearly five hours on the water – Leo grabbed the binoculars to check the buoys. He was convinced that one had dropped into the water, though it wasn’t moving.
His wife, and others on the boat, weren’t so sure. The boat stayed put for half an hour, all the while Leo saying the buoy was in the water. Lights caught the reflection of three sets of gator eyes near the buoy, only adding to his certainty.
After a while, the hunters decided to go investigate the buoy – only to find that the jug had fallen out of the tree, but there was no gator on the other end of the rope.
Instead, a gator had chomped on another hunter’s bait only a few feet from their buoy.
The luckier hunters pulled up and discovered the gator on their line and realized that they couldn’t claim it as they had already filled their gator permits.
They tossed their buoy to Jay and Leo and told them to have at it.
Susan had her gator.
Jay and Leo struggled with the harpoon for a few moments before being able to use the bang stick (a .44 Magnum at the end of a long pole) on the gator’s head, startling the unsuspecting passengers on the pontoon.
The guys pulled the gator out of the water and onto the deck of the boat and quickly taped its mouth shut, all the while its legs moved and tail twitched.
Between 1 and 1:30 a.m., the pontoon pulled up to the dock and the hunters headed home with their catch.
Susan said after the hunt that she’s not sure if her Fellsmere constituents would suspect that she was a gator hunter.
“I don’t know that they would expect it,” she said. “But they certainly wouldn’t be shocked by it.”
“It’s definitely a Fellsmere type thing.”
