It all started when I wanted to take an alligator with the airbow. This was the Benjamin Pioneer Airbow, a recent product release out of Crosman. It was an arrow-firing airgun. It wound up taking me three years to get the points to hunt in this area in South Carolina and when I was finally drawn I had two tags, one for a seven-foot-or-less gator and a second one of any length.

I was pretty excited to finally draw. Only then did I realize I didn't know any guides in South Carolina. 

But as it turns out, I had a fraternity brother from back in my days at the College of Charleston who was still down there and had spent time working with the SC Division of Wildlife. So I gave him a phone call and said, do you know anybody who can take me? And he knew just the guy.

Justin Stroud turned out to be one of the more solid fellas I've ever met and we got along great. Hunting alligators wasn't his first rodeo and he had the gear. He also knew my intention of wanting to do something with an air rifle and the dates were set for September.

Back in New York I went to work getting the tackle necessary for the arrows I'd be shooting and it really changed things. The airbow was dead nuts at fifty yards but as soon as I put a 400-grain barbed broadhead on it, it was dropping quite a bit at just ten yards. I figured I'd probably be closer than that so I started focusing on seven yards. Understand, the purpose for the arrow isn't to kill it. The arrow and broadhead are designed to puncture the thick hide and the large barbs would prevent it from pulling out. Tied to this would be a buoy. We can locate him if he takes off or better yet, he rolls and wraps himself up, going nowhere.

Tying a heavy line to that arrow was going to cut that distance even more so but it so happened I had a spool of Dacron fishing line from my dad that worked out great. It spooled out of a bucket by my feet and we were off to the races.

The Santee Coastal Reserve, near Georgetown, was a Wildlife Management Area under the control of the state of South Carolina so I proactively reached out and told the area manager I'd be hunting with an air rifle. It was not a disallowed weapon, it simply wasn't specifically on the permitted list. Once I explained what the airbow's capabilities were, the setup, my guide was experienced, I was approved.

Now I'm in South Carolina, hook up with Justin, we head over there. The guy who approved it was not there. His assistant came out and met us. He says, "Oh by the way, you are no longer allowed to use your air gun." I was stunned not so much by the flip flop, but that the guy who allowed it and then disallowed it decided not to be there to let me know and had somebody else deliver the news.

I was pretty hot but no worries. Justin had a harpoon that he'd used many times, rigged and ready to go so we got our gear on and off we went. Before we left his place I did try throwing that harpoon. This thing was about 8 ft. long and fiberglass and it was heavy. I was terrible with it. Now faced with the fact that I would not be able to use the airbow, I've got to figure out fast how I'm going to manage this harpoon.

The area is an impoundment with a bunch of dikes running around sections of water. Along the dikes we come to a gate for water to flow beneath a dike into the next section. We check these gates because apparently the gators would like to hang out by them. After a while we'd see an alligator in the water and Justin would estimate its length. All you could see were his eyes and his nose. The way to judge an alligator's length when all you can see are his eyes and his nose is to estimate the distance from the eyeball to the tip of his nose. That distance, in inches, equates to the overall length in feet and after seeing these things up close, it's pretty accurate.

After a while of not much action we head back towards the front section of this area. It's got a little bit of a beach, rather than standing up high on a dike looking down at the water. Justin carries a fishing rod with a treble hook on it and this would be used as a locator. The idea is that when you see an alligator, you cast out to it and try to hook onto the gator. Not necessarily hook him like you would a fish, but just grab a hold of it anywhere. Let that treble hook hook the body somewhere so you can locate where he is in the water.

He walks down to the water's edge with his fishing pole and just starts smacking it on the water: wap, wap, wap, wap, wap. Next thing I know alligators start appearing everywhere. It was like ringing the dinner bell. The plan was to catch one for the 7-foot tag I had in my pocket so that I'd have an idea of how things were going to go down before we go looking for a monster. He hooked up with one and was able to get this one to the beach pretty easily just with that fishing pole. We were able to put a pistol shot into it and it was done. Actually it wasn't all that difficult. I think it ran pretty close to that 7 ft. and I thought, "Well this is no big deal. This is going to be a piece of cake." Got the pictures done, alligator loaded in the truck, and off we went to look for what I was really after.

We rode around the dikes and found a spot where we could get down off the dike and look through some trees out into a section of water. We see something and Justin casts out to it. He hooks up and hands me the rod. He says, "Take one step out to the right, see if you can see it."

At this point I'm about knee-deep in water, and I take one step and there's no bottom. I go all the way down, up to my chest, holding a rod with a tight line and suddenly that line goes absolutely slack. 

What has happened: that gator was swimming away from us and as I fall into the water the gator turns around. I immediately recognize the situation I have now found myself in and start hollering at Justin.

Justin grabs my belt on the back of my pants and yanks me out of the water. We never did see that alligator and we got unhooked shortly after that. I said, "Dude, we gotta try something else."

At this point the tide had been going down for a good while and we were getting pretty close to low tide. A lot of the marshes were now just pluff mud. From a dike we could see two really nice alligators but the only way to get to them was to walk across the marsh, which was now just mud, and try to put a harpoon in one of them. Off we go.

If you've ever walked in pluff mud, you know there's no walking in pluff mud. Every step sinks up to your knee. By this time my fraternity brother had joined us and he was helping spot from the dike. He could see the channel running from the dike out towards the larger body of water and we were trying to walk along that creek, trying to get close to this alligator.

We never did get close enough. The alligator went down and we never saw it again. I'm actually glad because I don't think I would have been able to get that harpoon to it. If we had, then we were looking at trying to wrestle it in that mud, and that would've been real tough.

No more action happened that day till we left at dark but before leaving we stopped and shone a light out into the water. That was one of the spookiest sights: seeing all those eyes out in the water. We never saw them in the day but at night they were everywhere.

The next morning we head back up there. The fraternity brother couldn't join us but a friend of Justin's hooked up with us and we headed back to that same creek where we'd seen that alligator the day before. It wasn't quite high tide but the water was definitely higher than it was the day before.

We're standing on this dike at one of the flow gates and Justin kicks the gate a few times. Out of the water directly below us, a dinosaur rises up, full head out of the water. It was massive.

Justin immediately casts to it and misses. He jumps down off the dike, gets on the creek bank above it, and keeps casting. I've got a second fishing pole I'm hooked up with. The new guy now has a harpoon. 

Standing directly above the gate, waiting for this alligator to rise, my line breaks and then the gator comes up directly below the gate by the dike. Justin's buddy is standing above it and hits it square with a harpoon. Line peels off, the buoy shoots out, and this alligator starts rolling, doing exactly what we'd hoped, wrapping itself up in the rope.

I jump down off the dike to the bank next to Justin. I've got a Taurus .44 revolver. This alligator eventually gets tired and rises up, facing us, and I put a round right between the eyes. It's done.

Justin looks at me. "That's a whole lotta motherfucker right there!"

Now we've got to figure out how to get this sumbuck out of the water. Justin tells me to keep an eye on him, saying that he's not dead. An alligator's brain is about the size of a golf ball and you don't consider them dead until you're able to sever the spinal cord.

I stay by it on that bank while Justin grabs the pickup truck. He and the buddy run a cable down to it from the winch of the truck. They get that cable attached to it and start trying to pull it out. It's about 3 or 4 feet up the bank before there's a relatively low rise to pull it up on top of the dike. That cable snaps a few times and Justin says, "If this pull doesn't work we're just going to have to wait till high tide comes in."

Fortunately we didn't have to wait that long because that last pull got him up where we needed to go. 

First thing Justin does is get a hammer and chisel. He puts it right behind the skull and severs the spinal cord. The alligator gives a jerk and then we start celebrating.

This was one of the wildest hunts I've done. Only two hunters were permitted. We did come across the other hunter, who was in a big battle in a canoe. We watched him and another guy in a canoe try to wrestle an alligator by the gunnel and I thought, "There is no freaking way I'm doing that." I still don't know if he got it. At one point Justin tried to get me to use a pirogue, which is a traditional boat or float used down in the Low Country. It's flat, thin, and extremely low to the water. The next thing closest to it is a sheet of plywood. I tried it for about 30 seconds. I never could get it settled. It was constantly rocking back and forth. My balance was awful. You're supposed to stand on these things and use a push pole to get around. I could never get off my knees.

We eventually got this big old gator loaded into the pickup and took it down to the processor. The first thing he asked was, "Did you cut the spinal cord?" He said he had a gator come in once and it "came back to life." It opened its eyes and started looking around so now it becomes the first thing he asks.

I was interested in how they were going to skin this thing because I knew how thick and tough the hides were so I watched as they got started. They cut a slit with a knife and then ran a hose from an air compressor into that slit and started pumping air into it. It was fascinating. They started blowing up like a balloon and it separated the skin from the muscle. It made it a whole lot easier to work with.

I wound up getting a full-body mount of the 7-footer and gave that to Justin. The 12-footer ultimately weighed in at 435 pounds. I did a shoulder mount that has two of its paws on the plaque as well and the other two paws were made into lamp bases. They're really neat. They're also really creepy. They look straight out of Stephen King's house. Definite conversation starters in the living room.