The sight of record-smashing whopper gators, even from the safety of newspaper photos, gives some in Mississippi pause about fun in and life on the water.
Three alligators harvested by Mississippi hunters this past weekend chomped state records into history and set new ones: a 10-foot female weighing 295.3 pounds and two monster males that tipped scales at 723.5 pounds (record holder for about an hour) and 727 pounds, respectively.
One look at the pictures — one longer than a lineup of six men and the other looming far larger than the hunter hoisting his tail — triggers awe and perhaps a prick of primordial fear. Big jaws, big teeth, big tail ... hightail it on out of there!
Jackson mosaic artist Teresa Haygood, who grew up with a canoe, borrows a kayak when she can and hikes trails along the Pearl River, loves seeing huge alligators in pictures. “I don’t love the fact that they’re killing them necessarily, but there’s just something majestic about the fact that they can actually get so big, and can grow to approximately 40 or so years old. That’s how old I am.” She thinks about the hatching, their journey till then and “I guess that’s the fairy tale story.
“The minute that I start feeling sorry for ’em, I picture myself being eaten by one. So it solves the whole problem,” Haygood says. “The minute that I’m stuck on the water and those teeth are coming at me, I think I’d probably be hitting it with a paddle and running for my life.”
On a recent kayak trip, she spotted three gators in one bend, “just one of those busy days, I guess. It was like Alligator Festival.” She nearly knocked herself out of the kayak doing a U-turn, she said, but then told herself to be brave. “I’m supposed to be the top of the food chain here.”
Michelle Blair, Clarion-Ledger kayaking blogger and director of the Sept. 14 Gator Bait Race in Brandon, counted 14 alligators along one mile of the course last year, she said, but hasn’t seen a single one in the three times they’ve kayaked the course in recent weeks. “You see them from time to time ... but it’s never really a concern of mine,” Blair said. “They don’t tend to be aggressive to kayakers. They’ll warn you if you happen to be in their space and they don’t want you there.”
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