Nothing in my life has ever come easy: school, work, and even play presents itself as a challenge at some points. This is an example of one of the many times I’ve had to create opportunities for myself-- and my friends, in this case; I just kept telling myself through this whole thing… “make something happen Nate, just MAKE an opportunity…. make lemonade out of lemons”…and you might know…I do love lemonade.
I got a call about two weeks ago from an enthused gator hunter with two tags for Lake Poinsett. This guy, Bill, goes to my dad’s church and got my number from my dad who I’m sure was telling his own stories of heroism from his hunt with me just weeks before-- I can just see him standing around the coffee maker at church, “yeah, it was HUGE!!!” I was pretty much packed up and finished with lizard hunting for the year with my four tags filled and the meat in the freezer, but when opportunity knocks, I guess you HAVE to answer the door. In this case, answer the phone. Bill and I compared our busy schedules and decided to hunt this past Friday night. I went ahead and scouted the week before due to the fact that our area had received up to 12 inches of rain over the last week. The water is at historic highs and that got me worried about where the underwater ninjas-of-the-night would be. No biggie: as my scouting trips confirmed, they had stuck to similar patterns and I assumed that, aside from what appeared to be a little more rough housing than usual, this would be a “sure thing,” right? Sure, Nate, right… all you need is a boat that runs when you need it to.
As fate would have it, Bill showed up on time at 6:00 p.m. as I was ripping out fuel lines from my non-functional outboard, chasing some type of blockage in my fuel system and -- in the mean time -- spilling litters of polluted fuel into the St. Johns. Not good. “This is really, really, not good!” I thought. It’s been 5 years since I have broken down at the ramp and this was not a time I wanted to mess around with this. I had to do something: Bill, his son and his son’s friend were standing there on the dock, looking down at the dead vessel and me scurrying around like a blind mouse. Smelling like waterlogged fuel and worried the hunt would turn into a complete bust, I made a few phone calls and procured what was a hopefully functional john boat, Jonah’s. Thank goodness for good friends. One small issue there, though: Jonah was in Missouri at a wedding and his boat keys were locked up in his house. Ok, a quick trip to Rockledge to pick up his spare house keys from his brother, Adam (who was nice enough to meet halfway), and off to Port St. John to pick up the possibly functioning boat, which Jonah said he hadn’t run it in a few weeks. I could only think of the predicament I would be in if I got to the ramp and the john boat wouldn’t start. Bill was a good sport and came with me to run around the county, swapping boats and transferring gear. Now it was back to the ramp, WHEW! Crisis averted!!! Vrroommm. The john boat started…thank God, Get in, Let’s GO.
It was almost 9 p.m. and we were just leaving the ramp. I was just glad we were on the water at all at this point; whatever happened after this was going to be great. Even seeing a pair of glowing eyes watching us from the darkness would greatly encourage this group of four grown men on a 15 ft aluminum john boat. At this point that’s what we headed out to do: find something...anything! I didn’t care if I had to find some alligator GAR to look at, we needed a boost. We drifted around the mouth of Lake Poinsett through the lily pads and down the curving shoreline, in the dark, waiting for the elusive monster to conveniently present itself next to the boat for our easy pickings. We had a gator pop up right next to the boat, but of course we weren’t ready; of course, why would we be. At least we were able to use this first quick stop at the mouth of the lake to get settled into the johnboat and get an idea of how all the gear worked. Bill brought some gear and I brought some gear so we had no shortage of stuff on the boat. With nothing really popping up, we headed out and aimed south.
We ran around the swamp for an hour or so, maybe two, from Lake Poinsett south through Middle River and into Lake Winder, with stops here and there, but we had no real good chances. Maybe the occasional 50/50 chance, but nothing panned out. Continuing to work against the north-flowing St. Johns River, we found ourselves in a small lagoon I’ve been seeing a good size gator in, but the water was so high it could have been anywhere and we never did see it.
By this time we were getting sore, cramping up, and getting tired of the lack of seating accommodations the johnboat offered, so we decided to start going down-current with the inevitable goal of the boat ramp, a comfy car ride home and a warm bed in mind. We did essentially the same thing as we did going up-current but we used the current as much to our advantage as we could. With the increased amount of water, the current was much stronger then it has been all year. This high water also meant two other things: it was too deep to push pole the boat quieter and closer to the gators and it allowed us to float down the river giving us time to get set in the boat and ready to try for a gator we picked out to hunt. We used the float method a few times and got a few really good chances but ultimately no hook ups. I kept telling the guys that one of them would screw up and give us a really good chance and we had to just keep trying, just keep picking them out and making slow descents down the river toward their glowing eyes. I don’t think they believed me after a little while… but then a gator proved me right…one screwed up right in front of us. As we approached the Duda Canal, the spotter shined a set of eyes he deemed worthy of a stalk and signaled one was coming, but I didn’t see it so I asked for him to light it up again; he did and in his haste he turned around to ask if I had seen it this time but he had just shined the 100,000,000 candle-powered spot light right in my eyes in his excitement. A few seconds went by and I was able to pick out a faint silhouette in the moon light slowly slinking, slinking inevitabley to the bottom of the center of the river thus out of reach for this crew to get. It came out from under a floating island of hydrila dislodged from the shore line as a result of that evening’s airboat adventurers. It was now or never—I grabbed my rod, a quick flip and a perfect cast right over its neck. SPLASH…got ‘em! Right then, it was amazing, I saw the heaven’s open and a thousand angels blew the trumpets of VICTORY!!! The weight from the shoulders of this 90 pound wuss of a Capt. was lifted toward the clouds. It was going to be up to this wily four man crew to be the ones to get it in the boat. Throughout the next hour or so the four men in the john turned into four kids waiting for the gator to come to the surface much like a kid waits to open their gifts on Christmas morning. For the most part, wait is all we did. This gator peeled off a bunch of line right in the beginning and grabbed on the bottom of the river and stayed there. We tried EVERYTHING to get her off the bottom; we tried to get another fishing hook into its hide, we tried a Willy Snag Hook (as seen on TV, on Swamp People) and we even thought about just jamming the pole spear down toward it but it wouldn’t reach due to the high water. At some point during the mayhem we thought we lost it but SURPRISE, it was still there. Once it finally let go of the bottom and we got the first really good visual on what we’d hoped was a monster the way it made its self so seemingly heavy, we discovered it was only around 7-8 feet. Regardless of its size, at this point, we were taking it. So, the plan was for me to reel it up to the surface and have someone shoot the spear gun into it so we had a larger line in it to give us a little more leverage. Well…that plan went to hell when I heard someone behind me ask…”how does this work?…bang…” There goes the spear into the darkness…Hmmm? “Ok, someone get the pole spear.” Bill ended up getting the pole spear into it at the moment my hook came loose while the gator was next to the boat. Once we had a bigger line into the gator and it used up its energy biting the boat a few times (sorry, Jonah), it was no match for a few .357 magnum rounds. The gator ended up measuring in at 7 ½ feet and Bill's got about16 pounds of tail meat to snack on this winter.
All in all, it was a great trip and a success to boot. Other than some gunk in the carburetors and a minor spear gun mishap, this one counts as another notch in the belt and new friends made.
