He tipped the ‘scales’!
A humongous alligator pulled from a South Carolina lake after a years-long pursuit shattered records when the 14-foot beast weighed in at a jaw-dropping 844 pounds.
The colossal critter, nicknamed “Snaggletooth,” was confirmed as the state’s second-biggest gator ever caught after hunters bagged him at Lake Moultrie on Monday, according to The Post and Courier.
The giant gator was harpooned by Cole Poplin and William Ard of Renegade Bowfishing, who were hunting with clients Chris and Craig Webb, at around 11 p.m., according to the paper.
Poplin said the rogue reptile had been his white whale since 2022.
“I spotted this gator four years ago, roughly,” Poplin told the paper. “I’ve hunted this gator a lot over the last three or four years. Four years later, we have a magical night, and he just happened to slip up and make a mistake, and we made it count.”
The hunters struggled at first to capture the beast and hoist it onto their boat, they said.
“On the last bit of ground to cover Cole and I put eyes on a monster and all hell broke loose,” Webb wrote in a Facebook post. “We scrambled to get him harpooned. One was good, one bounced off. We ended up with 3 stuck in him and a treble by his front leg.”
He said the group measured the gator at “14 feet on the nose” and it later weighed in at 844 pounds — the state’s second-largest ever, according to the paper.
“STATE RECORD BABY!” Webb celebrated in the post.
The biggest alligator ever caught in South Carolina was a 1,025-pound, 13-footer bagged by Maryellen Mara-Christian at Lake Moultrie in 2010.
