600 lb. gator caught overnight

MOBILE, Ala. (WALA) - Despite a stormy start, Alabama’s annual alligator season got underway Thursday night. The big catch for the first night went to a group of Mobile men.

Matt Breland and a group of friends had a long and stormy night on the delta, but brought home plenty to show for it. Their monster bull gator tipped the scales at nearly six hundred pounds. You could call it luck, but these guys aren’t rookies to gator hunting.

“We’ve drawn a tag, you know, at least one person for the last five years and we’ve got a gator the last five years,” Breland said.

Breland’s friends, Keith McKenzie, Brandon Sager and Trey Weatherly have done their homework. It’s no accident that they were able to harvest the trophy, which measured 13-feet, three inches.

“We’ve seen them in there for years now…since we were little kids and we they were big then so we kind of went several months ago and scouted them out,” said Breland. “We never went back. We didn’t bother them and we went in there and hung him.”

The team used three large snatch hooks attached to conventional fishing tackle to battle the beast. After two hours of fighting and tiring out the reptile, they were able to put it in Breland’s 15-foot aluminum boat and head to the scales.

They weren’t the only ones to find success on the first night. Out of 125 tags issued, 17 were filled. State Biologist Chris Nix has helped oversee the Delta Region alligator hunt since it began in 2006 and was at the check station for all of the action, which started off slow due to bad weather.

“Most of the hunters didn’t go out until around ten last night so it was slow for us till around midnight, but it steadily picked up and we ended up having a pretty good night,” Nix said.

One look at the big gator revealed a healed up wound where half of a rear leg had been bitten off. The battle scar gave a clear message to Breland of where he needs to hunt again next year.

“It takes a big alligator to eat another thirteen foot alligator’s foot off so, you know, there’s some other big alligators up there,” Breland said hopefully.

That is, if their luck can hold out for a sixth year in a row. For now, there’s a lot of cleaning to be done and a lot of hide to be tanned. In case you were wondering, the hunters would only say that their trophy came from a creek in north Mobile County off the Mobile River.

There are three zones the state is conducting alligator hunts in. Officials said over 5,600 people put in applications for a tag, which allows them one alligator. Over 2,600 of those were for the Delta Region. Of those, only 125 were lucky enough to receive a tag. The hunts will continue Friday and Saturday night and then resume next Thursday through Saturday nights.