Round 8 p.m. on the opening evening of South Carolina’s alligator searching season, Kim Bolen Lawhon helped launch a 17-foot johnboat from Blount’s Touchdown close to Eutawville. Joined by her husband and two buddies, they searched across the Sixteen Island area of Lake Marion, in search of a gator that measured seven ft or longer.
After an hour of cruising and looking with spotlights, they lastly glimpsed a possible goal. They headed straight for it however the gator shortly went beneath. One of many hunters forged a line anyway and hooked the gator with a heavy fishing rod.
“None of us actually knew what dimension [gator] we had hooked, even after preventing it for the primary 10 minutes,” Lawhon, a mom of two boys, instructed Carolina Sportsman. “It might all of the sudden come as much as the floor, simply barely giving us a glimpse, after which again down he’d go to roll.”
The 4 hunters quickly received one other huge treble hook within the gator—this one rigged to a thick rope. The gator fought onerous for the subsequent three hours and so they couldn’t see what they had been up in opposition to till they lastly received it near the boat.
“That’s after we all noticed that he was what we name ‘a grown man,’” Lawhon mentioned. “That’s after we realized simply how huge this monster actually was.”
A collection of movies posted to Lawhon’s Fb web page present the chaos that ensued after they completed off the massive alligator. Utilizing a semi-auto handgun, Lawhon shoots on the gator thrice and hits it within the head at the least twice. (South Carolina rules enable hunters to dispatch alligators with handguns or bangsticks, however not rifles.)
With the alligator lifeless within the water, the trio tried however didn’t haul it over the gunnels of the johnboat. So, they tagged it and secured it with rope, after which motored again to the boat ramp the place 10 or extra individuals had been already ready to assist.
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They took the massive gator to Palmetto Processing. It weighed round 700 kilos and measured 12 ft, 2 inches lengthy. In a photograph of Lawhon taken on the processor, she’s sporting a t-shirt that reads: Searching Mother. Like a Regular Mother However Cooler.
“Shirt says all of it,” Lawhon wrote in a Fb put up. “Want my boys had been part of this particular second however subsequent tag all of us within the boat!”
