Finally on the last hunt we closed the distance on a really nice gator. This one had to be somewhere in the ten foot.
We made it with yards of the gator and as my dad drew the gator started going under. He underestimated the speed at which the gator was submerging and shot right over it's nose.
That became the topic of conversation for the rest of the hunt.
For the next couple hours we only were able to get close the small gators until we were heading back the mouth of the creek.
As we were moving through a channel in the pads my dad caught eyes closing in front of us. This gator was moving fast than normal trying to get into the pads before we got to close.
He made a fatal mistake and stayed in the channel too long. As he started going under my dad remembered the lessons taught by the others he has missed and shot lower this time.
At the shot I seen the gator go under the boat and yelled you have him.
My dad thought he had missing as the one just went the bottom and did not run. He then manually pulled the line from the reel and threw the float in the water.
We then gathered up the equipment to subdue him and went back to retrieve the float.
This fella decided he wanted to bury himself in the grass at the bottom of the lake so it took us longer to get him off the bottom.
He was no where as active as the first gator my dad shot and getting him under control and it to the boat was easy.
This gator was shot at 0500 and came in at about 6.5 feet.