A 15-foot alligator killed by an Alabama family on Friday broke state records, weighing in at over 1,000 pounds.
Mandy Stokes
told Al.com that she had joked about wearing pearls to go hunting so that she’d look good when she brought in a record catch. She made the joke after hearing about a 2011 record alligator caught by Keith Fancher and his crew that was 14 feet, 2 inches, and 838 pounds.
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Little did Stokes know that, along with her husband John Stokes and her brother-in-law Kevin Jenkins and his two teenage children, she would blow that record out of the water.
The alligator the Stokes caught was so big that when it was hoisted onto the scale, it broke the winch, Al.com said, and a backhoe had to be brought in to weigh the creature.
"Truthfully, after I saw the Fancher Gator, in my mind I was thinking there's no way we can catch anything bigger than that," Mandy Stokes told Al.com. "When I finally saw it the full-body mount at the Gee's Bend Terminal, the main thing I remembered was the size of its feet. When I saw the size of the foot on this one, I knew it was a good one."
It may, in fact, be the largest alligator ever killed legally by a hunter, Al.com said. An initial search of records indicate most came in underneath the Stokes’ gator.
Jenkins hooked the gator about 10:30 p.m. Friday, but the family would battle it for five hours, even losing it at one point before snagging it again, Al.com said.
Mandy Stokes’ first shot from a 20-gauge shotgun didn’t hit the “sweet spot” that would kill the alligator, and “All it did was make this gator mad," she told Al.com.
But eventually, the family prevailed, and Mandy Stokes got her pictures — with a record-breaking alligator and pearls.
The Associated Press said the family had to tie the alligator to one side of the boat and lean on the other side so they didn’t tip over. They were planning to send their record catch to a taxidermist.
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