Eyeball to eyeball with the biggest known alligator in Arkansas, Jim Pelt of Camden momentarily lost his nerve when the gator winked.
"I knew I'd have to shoot it again," said Pelt, who killed a 13-foot, 10-inch alligator last Saturday in an Arkansas River backwater near Arkansas Post.
Pelt's gator topped the previous record of 13-9, killed by Drew Baker of North Little Rock in 2013. Pelt said there were no scales big enough to weigh the beast, but he said Arkansas Game and Fish biologists estimated it to weigh about 900 pounds.
Pelt, 41, a production manager for Spectra Technologies, had applied for a permit to participate in the state's controlled alligator hunt in September for six years. The AGFC issued 72 alligator permits this year, including 20 for the Lower Arkansas River Wetland Complex.
It so happened that two of Pelt's friends, Morgan Gwin and Ragan McDaniel, both of Camden, have hunting camps near Arkansas Post and volunteered to help.
"Both of them do a lot of fishing and frog gigging down there, and they already knew where the gators were at," Pelt said. "Morgan had some pictures on his phone of some gators that he thought were 10- or 12-foot long. I would have been ecstatic with a 10-footer."
A hunter may have up to three helpers, so Pelt's father, Robert McDaniel, completed the foursome.
The group arrived at Moore's Bayou at about 7 p.m. and launched their boat at 7:38 p.m., which was the earliest legal hunting time for the special gator season. Only one other boat was in the area, Pelt said.
Pelt had removed his electric trolling motor from his boat after Game and Fish Commission personnel told him he had a better chance of sneaking up on a gator with push poles.
When darkness set over the wetlands, Pelt said the water came alive with the red reflections of alligator eyes. The push poles were too slow to catch up to the gators, so they made a quick trip to reinstall the trolling motor.
Pelt also discovered that white light spooked the gators, so he covered his spotlight with a red filter.
It's hard to determine a gator's size in the water, but Pelt said the distance between a gator's eyes and the tip of its snout is roughly equal to its body length in feet. The first gator they saw was about 10 feet long, Pelt estimated, but they couldn't get near it.
They found an even bigger one that tolerated their approach but didn't know at the time that it was the biggest known gator in the state.
"We kept getting closer and closer, and it kept getting bigger and bigger," Pelt said.
The gator determined that 15-20 feet was close enough, and it started to sound. That's when Gwin, the "Alligator Whisperer," summoned it back to the surface.
"Morgan talked to the alligator, and he came right back up to the top," Pelt said.
He did it by mimicking a gator's raspy call.
"It sounded almost like a little cat," Pelt said.
Pelt harpooned the gator at 10:05 p.m. and it went straight to the bottom, about 20 feet deep, and stayed there for 2 hours and 40 minutes.
Pelt said he stands about 6-3 and weighs about 300 pounds. His dad is about the same size.
"We're a couple of big ol' boys," Pelt said, "but we couldn't budge that gator."
Pelt said those were anxious hours. They worried that it might shed the harpoon line or that they simply wouldn't be able to raise it. And how long can a gator stay submerged, anyway? Pelt said he Googled it on his smartphone.
"Google said they can stay down about 30 minutes," Pelt said. "Google lied."
When the gator finally resurfaced, Pelt said he froze when he saw how big it actually was. He hit it with a second harpoon, and that's when the real fun began.
"All heck broke loose," Pelt said. "He began rolling and thrashing around and bit one of the lines in two, so we were back down to just one line."
To complicate matters, Pelt's snare wasn't wide enough to clear the gator's head. The best he could do was snare the jaw.
The next step was to shoot the gator, but that wasn't so easy, either.
"I have been hunting my whole life, but at that moment I forgot how to load a shotgun," Pelt said.
In his excitement, Pelt chambered a shell backwards and jammed the action. With a 13-plus foot gator trying to sink the boat and three people yelling and stomping, Pelt struggled to clear the action and reload his 20-gauge semiautomatic. He shot the gator in the head, but that just made him madder.
The gator lifted out of the water and stood nearly face to face with Pelt.
"He looked like Godzilla," Pelt said. "If he'd have fell over backwards, he would have come right in the boat."
Pelt said the gator pulled the boat fast enough to cut a wake. He finally put a third shot of No. 5 lead in its head and finished it off. Or so he thought.
Pelt leaned down to attach a temporary transportation tag to the gator's leg. His arms were in the water, and his face was inches from the gator, then the gator blinked and Pelt lurched back into the boat.
"That scared us, so we shot it again," Pelt said.
At 2:25 a.m., Pelt called the Game and Fish Commission to report the kill and the group was met by two wildlife officers at the ramp.
They measured the gator. Twice. They murmured and clucked, then they called Mark Barbee, the AGFC's alligator biologist.
"They turned to us and said, 'Boys, it looks like we got us a new state record,'" Robert Pelt said.
Initially, Pelt said he was disappointed that the gator was -- get this -- so small. That's because of the eye-to-nostril estimation. The distance was about 16 inches, so Pelt expected it to be 15-16 feet long.
"It just had an abnormally large head," Pelt said.
What does one do with a 13-foot, 10-inch alligator?
"We're gonna eat it," Pelt said.
A processor in Dumas is handling the meat. Pelt said Bass Pro Shops, Cabelas and Mack's Prairie Wings have contacted him about displaying the mount.
As for the 20-gauge shotgun, Pelt said there is a reason he chose it over the greater firepower of a 12-gauge. Pelt bought the gun for his grandson, who is 2 years old.
"He won't use it for a long time, so I thought it would be really nice if he knew his papaw killed a gator with it," Pelt said.
Not just any gator, but the state's biggest gator.
Sports on 09/27/2015