Sitting in a small boat in the middle of alligator infested waters in Orlando, FL, junior Sydney Hess and her dad need flashlights to see the others in the boat. But nobody is complaining as the two are bonding over something that can’t be done in Texas: a gator hunt.
“I love gator hunting,” Sydney said. “Me and my dad have gone since I was in 8th grade and it is really fun. Neither of my sisters go really, usually it is just me and my dad.”
Alligator hunting can be a quite complex process.
“You put out a smelly, stinky piece of meat that has been rotting out in the sun for a few days and you thread this rope through it that has a cork in it to get caught in the gator’s throat,” father Mark Hess said. “The meat is a rotten cow lung so it will float and that is attached to a buoy which has a fishing line on it so you can find it later on. If there is anything on it you harpoon it and keep throwing harpoons until you get it and you bring it up. Depending on how big it is when you bring it up you can either cut its spinal cord or bangstick it, which is like a stick that has a bullet in it like a gun. If you want to do it a different way you can sneak up on a gator and harpoon it from the boat but that is more difficult.”
Gator hunting occurs late at night with a floodlight making gators easy to spot with their glowing eyes.
“You set the baits out around 4-6 and you just kind of scope out the area and chill until it gets dark,” Sydney said. “You go check the bait around midnight and if there is something on the bait you see how big it is and if you want it.”
The second night of the hunt led to two alligators joining the boat.
“Our gator was harpooned off the boat and we got three harpoons in it and brought it up,” Sydney Hess said. “When you hit the gator with the harpoon the tip will pop out and turn sideways and get stuck in the alligator. The gator we got after we harpooned it was almost 8 feet.”
Once the gator was pulled into the boat Hess headed back to the dock.
“It was 3:00 in the morning by the time we got off the boat, so after that we went and got IHOP,” Hess said. “The other guys we were with, my dad’s friends, took the gator to a gator locker where they butcher and skin them and do whatever taxidermy that you want done with it. Overall I would say the weekend was pretty successful, but it wasn’t fun having to go back to normal life and school.”
“After Sydney got back to school she showed me a bunch of pictures from gator hunting and it looked really cool,” junior Michelle Rodriguez said. “It’s definitely not something you hear about every day.”
