00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the meat-eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. We hunt the meat-eater podcast. You can't predict anything. Brought to you by First Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds no-compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T.com. L-I-T-E dot com. Welcome, everybody. Today I'm joined by Florida man, Captain Bob Stafford, like the actual Florida man. When you see a headline that says Florida man, this guy, Captain Bob Stafford. In all seriousness, Bob Stafford's a guide. He guides in Lake Okeechobee, Florida. He guides for ducks. Largemouth bass, crappies. 00:01:12 Speaker 2: Snipe. 00:01:13 Speaker 1: Snipe. But we're here to talk about one of the things he does, which he's a gator hunter. Guides gator hunts in Okeechobee, Lake Okeechobee. I met Bob. I've been thinking about talking to this man for many years because I met you maybe six, five years ago. About six years ago. We were out. And I was doing a different unrelated work project. Kind of like ancillary to the stuff I do. Kind of ancillary to what I do at Meat Eater. But we were working on a project and we were out in Lake Okeechobee and we were shooting tilapia with bows and arrows one night. And we were in Bob's, your buddy's airboat. Yeah. You clarified it was not this airboat. No, this one was being worked on. It was your buddy's airboat. And we were talking a bunch about gators. And what stuck in my head is he was telling me about baiting gators with chickens. And it's burrowed in my head. And we became kind of like, you know, text message friends. And I had planned on, anticipated that I was like, someday I'm going to come down and go gator hunting with you, which I've never done. And it's funny because More than any other, you know, you get a question like, have you ever done blank? Have you ever done blank? For questions for me, it would be the number one thing people say to me is, have you ever gone gator hunting? More than any other like kind of animal. I'm not kidding you. Have you ever gone gator hunting? And my answer is always no. And I kind of wanted to remedy that. But I had in my head that when I remedied that, I was going to remedy it with you because I got a kick out of talking to you. And the chicken thing stuck in my head. So finally, here we are. And we got some gators yesterday. We got like a, well, one of the gators we got was 11 feet, seven inches. A friend of mine, another Florida man, I texted it to him and he said, that's a gator of a lifetime or a lifetime gator or something to that effect. Yeah. 00:03:25 Speaker 2: It's like catching a 10 pound bass. 00:03:27 Speaker 1: Yeah. So we got a big old gator. Um, But I want to go back to, in terms of your experiences with gators and the market of gators and gator hunting, you're involved in all kinds of gator businesses. Gator eggs, wild gator egg collection, baby gator collection. This is sanctioned stuff, not law-breaking stuff. 00:03:50 Speaker 2: No, it's all completely licensed. 00:03:52 Speaker 1: Yeah, licensed activities. But in getting into this, I want to... Step back first, and can you explain what, like, when you were being brought up, what year were you born? 00:04:07 Speaker 2: I was born in 59. Okay, 1959. 00:04:10 Speaker 1: When you were brought up and you were a little kid, and back then, like, gators were protected by the Endangered Species Act. Yeah. When you were a little kid, what was your awareness of, of gators? How were people in your community? How did they view alligators? Like, like what are kind of your early memories about alligators and how alligators and man interacted? 00:04:33 Speaker 2: Well, a lot of it was my, my father was, uh, uh, he was a fishing guide also, but he was a sport fish captain, but he didn't like the ocean as much when he had free time. We spent a lot of time in the Everglades and on Lake Okeechobee. And we lived south down by Fort Lauderdale and Pompano. And he also, the Game Commission has a big part of it because there was this place that's not even there anymore. It was a place called Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. And there was a building and a store there. And they literally had programs where these game wardens would come for kids and all and show videos of the Everglades and games. alligators and stuff like that. And I just took a shine to it, you know, and I just loved being in the Everglades. My dad brought me up out there running the little kicker boats, duck hunting. And, you know, and that's, that's kind of where it started. I just, I love the Everglades. I love Lake Okeechobee. It's all, it's all, it all used to be all connected, you know, until they diked everything in and separated everything. 00:05:43 Speaker 1: Yep. 00:05:44 Speaker 2: Okeechobee was really the top of the Everglades. 00:05:48 Speaker 1: When they were an ESA animal, so even back then, let's say around 1960, you'd have been kind of old enough to know what was going on. Sorry, 1970, you'd have been old enough to know what's going on. Was it rare to see one? No, they were around, but there weren't as many then. Uh-huh. 00:06:11 Speaker 2: Because we used to wade fish in Lake Okeechobee, and there wasn't that many gators. When I was growing up in my adolescent years, even teenage years, there wasn't that many. I was not afraid to jump in the water. We didn't have trolling motors and stuff then. Tie a rope on my waist and drag my boat around with my dad fishing for bass. I wouldn't do that now because the program they had, it really worked. 00:06:36 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:06:37 Speaker 2: It didn't start opening up until 1988 when it became legal. They started allowing alligator hunting. 00:06:44 Speaker 1: Did you jump right into it in the 80s? It was 88 when they opened it up? 00:06:49 Speaker 2: I tried to apply for permits the first year, and it was different back then. I didn't get them. I didn't know much about it at that point. I always messed with gators. 00:06:58 Speaker 1: My dad was. 00:06:59 Speaker 2: Always mad at me because I would catch them, bring them home. My dad was always mad, but I've always been fascinated with alligators. 00:07:06 Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, because at that time, they had been protected for so long. There wasn't like a... So it was 1988 when they opened it up. Yeah. They'd been protected so long. There wasn't sort of like a class or an existing community of gator hunters. No, there was no gator hunting. Yeah. So what did that look like as people all of a sudden were like, man, we're allowed to go get some of these? What did it look like for people that were going out and trying to learn how to do it? Well, they did it. 00:07:40 Speaker 2: They made a class when they started to teach people how to do it. But what happened is a lot of the people, because when they first came out, they were given 15 alligator tags to one person. 00:07:53 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:07:54 Speaker 2: Nobody was guiding for hunts. And the hide buyers were really wanting the hides because there wasn't hardly any gator farms and stuff. 00:08:02 Speaker 1: Okay. Yeah. So. 00:08:04 Speaker 2: People started seeing dollar signs on them that's one thing that turns me off with alligator hunting because everybody that gets tags or now even now they see dollar signs they think they're gonna get rich off of alligators. 00:08:16 Speaker 1: Because at a time it was good money. 00:08:18 Speaker 2: Yeah well yeah because they were getting 60 to 80 dollars a foot for a hide. 00:08:22 Speaker 1: And if you applied for a permit in those days like now in this area i don't know about everywhere but i know that the permit we applied for in this area If you draw the permit, you get two alligator tags. Yeah. But back then, if you drew it, it's 15 gator tags. Yeah. And gators were worth how much a foot? 00:08:37 Speaker 2: Like $ 60 to $ 80 for the hide. And plus, you got meat, too. But you weren't allowed to sell the meat unless it went through a licensed processor. 00:08:46 Speaker 1: But if you had, in those days, if you got 15 gator tags, like... Was it full of huge gators? I mean, could guys honestly go out and make like a sizable chunk of money killing 15 gators and selling the leather? 00:09:03 Speaker 2: Yeah, they were not trophy hunting like what we were doing on our deal. They were going out and getting six to eight footers. 00:09:09 Speaker 1: I see. 00:09:10 Speaker 2: I mean, I didn't get involved in it at that point. You know, I still wanted to. I didn't get picked the first few years. 00:09:16 Speaker 1: I see, yeah. 00:09:17 Speaker 2: But I'd see guys on gas stations in an airboat and gators just piled up. 00:09:20 Speaker 1: I mean, they're 15, yeah. 00:09:23 Speaker 2: Yeah, they might not get all 15, but they had six, eight, ten gators. And you had to sit on your hides and wait for the hide validation program where they'd have a meeting and the people would inspect the hides and bid on them and pay you the money for them then. 00:09:40 Speaker 1: So what was the first year that you were able to go on a gator hunt? 00:09:44 Speaker 2: Probably around the early 90s, maybe 90, 92 is when I finally started. 00:09:51 Speaker 1: And they started cutting the tag numbers back. Oh, really? Yeah. 00:09:55 Speaker 2: So they started giving more tags out, more licenses. out to more people, but cut the numbers that you could get back. 00:10:04 Speaker 1: Got it. And in those days, when you started there, in those days, was it still like a commercial endeavor for people to go gator hunting? For me, it wasn't. I started out just, I really wasn't a guide then. Yep. 00:10:19 Speaker 2: I just started because I love gators. I started hunting gators. And then people knew that I hunted gators. 00:10:25 Speaker 1: And it's weird. 00:10:26 Speaker 2: It's like an evolution the way we hunted them. In the beginning, we would take airboats with harpoons with a buoy on a rope. And then you would just shine the light. And the gators were not used to it. You could run right over to the gator and throw the harpoon. And the buoy would go out. And you'd turn around, go pull them in, bang, stick them, and go get another one. 00:10:47 Speaker 1: That was the early days. Yeah, that was the early days. 00:10:49 Speaker 2: And then after a few years of that, alligators evolved too. 00:10:54 Speaker 1: They started getting smart. 00:10:56 Speaker 2: You start an airboat up and every gator within a half a mile would go down. 00:11:01 Speaker 1: That was the thing that surprised me over spending a couple days with you all was... I should say surprised because I didn't think about it before, but an observation I had and you validated it was that they are very aware that they're being hunted. Yes. And they are skittish. Yes. And they see a boat come around the bend of the river and the big ones are like, I'm out. Yep. And the little ones that haven't been around long don't know. 00:11:31 Speaker 2: If you're going around a river bend and the big gator hears you, he's going down before you even come around the bend. 00:11:37 Speaker 1: Yeah. And it's funny to think about at a time that they wouldn't have had that response. Yeah. No. Yeah. They wouldn't. 00:11:43 Speaker 2: You could just ride right up to them. 00:11:45 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:11:46 Speaker 2: Every once in a while you can do it now, but I'm not that good at harpooning. I don't like it as much. You know, that's why I hunt the way I do. 00:11:54 Speaker 1: What did you do with the first gators you got? When you started getting some tags and stuff, what were you doing with them? 00:12:01 Speaker 2: I wasn't even selling the hides. We were just like cleaning them ourselves. We would do our own processing. We would skin them ourselves, you know, and then cut the meat up. We would keep the meat for ourselves and salt the hides and get the hides tanned from a tannery. 00:12:17 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:12:18 Speaker 2: I didn't really get involved in selling the gators like they did in the beginning. 00:12:21 Speaker 1: Got it. Yeah, and you were telling me, like, walk through how you used to, like, another... Another thing that I shouldn't say surprised, but I hadn't thought about it before is I'm very aware of if you kill a deer, right? You got a real problem on your hands when it's hot out. Yeah. Like you got to get deer cooled off. Yeah. And I don't know, man, I hadn't really thought about that. And all of a sudden you got this 300, 400 pound reptile. It's 90 degrees out. It's like an issue. 00:12:52 Speaker 2: Oh, it's a major issue. If you want to do something with the hides and it's hot out, the scales will start flaking off. Like you saw that one in the office the other day where they didn't take care of it right. And the meat could go bad. So you had to get it cooled off right away. 00:13:09 Speaker 1: Yeah, and you used to tell people that you used to use a canoe. 00:13:13 Speaker 2: Yeah, I had an old canoe and an ice machine. We were only killing two a night when they got down to the two per license. I would bring them home. We'd be tired because we were hunting all night. In the beginning, you had to hunt at night. It was like a half hour before sunset to a half hour after sunrise. 00:13:32 Speaker 1: Oh, that was the rule. Yeah, that was the rule. It might have been an hour. I don't remember. 00:13:36 Speaker 2: But either way, I would come over here, put them in the cooler, and bury them in ice and go try to get a couple hours of sleep. And then you wake up during gator season. It's in the 90s usually every day. So I'd take one at a time and try to clean them as fast as I could and then get salt on the hides right away. And still some of the scales would. 00:13:58 Speaker 1: Slip. 00:13:58 Speaker 2: We call it slipping. 00:14:01 Speaker 1: And were you guys, were you selling some of that gator meat? No, I never did. Giving away to friends and stuff. 00:14:08 Speaker 2: You know, when I first started doing it, I didn't have a bunch of money and I couldn't afford to bring them to a processor. So we did it all ourselves. 00:14:14 Speaker 1: Yeah. Just made it. What was the, I had no idea until you just said it right now. Because I know a lot of your old gator hunting stories are night stories. Yeah. Yeah. I had no idea that it was that you were supposed to hunt at night. 00:14:28 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:14:29 Speaker 1: I don't even know what the reasoning was in the beginning. I swear. 00:14:34 Speaker 2: It was like the movie, The Jaws. That Jaws movie. 00:14:38 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:14:39 Speaker 2: We would go to the boat ramp and we would have to drive through protesters spitting on our trucks. 00:14:45 Speaker 1: The game wardens were there. 00:14:47 Speaker 2: Trying to make sure, you know, they had signs screaming at us where, you know, if you think you're macho, go kill a gator with a knife, you know, without a boat. I mean, they were screaming all kinds of stuff at us. You know, it was just, you know, I don't know why the knife thing was. I think they did it because they didn't want people seeing us doing it. I don't know. 00:15:06 Speaker 1: I don't know what the reasoning was. Talk about that evolution. Like you said, in the early days, Guys are throwing harpoons from airboats. 00:15:14 Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's still guys that do it that are really good at it. I've never been that great at it. So, you know, I learned how to, I'm a fisherman and I can cast good. And I started learning how to snag them with treble hooks. And it gets hard to do that too. Like they keep going down, you know, you have to just keep fan casting. And sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you wouldn't. 00:15:37 Speaker 1: But how do you know, If you're watching a gator 100 yards down the river and the gator goes under, how do you even begin to have an idea where to cast? 00:15:53 Speaker 2: Well, you got to kind of watch the way they go down. If they go down and their nose is up there and they just go down easy backwards like that, they're usually going right down and laying on the bottom. They know they're safe there. And that's when we would fan a cast. But like If they blow really hard, then they take off fast, and, you know, your chances of snagging them are slim. 00:16:15 Speaker 1: Got it. Yeah, tell people the setup you use to snag a gator. 00:16:19 Speaker 2: Yeah, I just use, like, I use bait casting kind of reels, bigger ocean reels, but we use, like, a 150 to 200-pound test line with a weighted treble hook on it and try to throw it over them. We try to get over their neck if we can. You want to hook them 50% from the body to the, forward okay if you hook them in the back it makes it a harder fight you're dragging the just like tail hooking up fish you know it's a harder fight yeah. 00:16:48 Speaker 1: And when you do that i never like i saw you do it but you're casting out you're retrieving real slow and eventually just feel the hook find its spot and then. 00:17:02 Speaker 2: Yeah, it depends on if they're laying on the bottom or if they're on the top. If they're on the top, I don't reel slow. I try to reel fast. I want the gator to be there and the hooks here. I want to set the hook when it's getting close. I don't want them to feel it. I want to drive it into them really fast. 00:17:21 Speaker 1: Because he's going to explode. 00:17:23 Speaker 2: Yeah, and you'll get a better hook set. But if they're on the bottom, you literally have to reel slow. until you see them and then you got to hope it's not a rock or a log but you know and set the hook. 00:17:34 Speaker 1: Yeah as hard as you can and you messed around in the past like i know that that's your preferred way now is running the rods with snagging hooks but you've messed around in the past all kinds of ways of hunting. 00:17:44 Speaker 2: Gators yeah i know like that's what i was saying it's an evolution like i mean the guy that runs our local uh processing plant he actually helped me a bunch when i was really starting to guide and get into it and and i'm like man i I'm just having a hard time getting these bigger gators. I got into bow hunting with a crossbow. We did that at night. In the beginning when we did it, we were like the only ones out there. We would make our lights red. I'd take a red magic marker on an aircraft landing light. 00:18:15 Speaker 1: Really? 00:18:16 Speaker 2: And we'd make our own. 00:18:17 Speaker 1: There's a light right here. Make your own red light. 00:18:19 Speaker 2: Yeah, we would just go around. It was really tricky. You couldn't shine the light right at the gator. You want to shine it above them. I would cut like a beer can or a Coke can so that the halo wouldn't be as bright on the bottom. And he hold it like on a, maybe a 20 degree angle over top of me. You're shining the beam up. I've never been in the woods. If somebody's shining a light at you, you can't tell if they're 10 feet or 10 miles away. And that's if you just take it really slow and you can't have anybody else shining lights around. Then we would just trolling motor close with a crossbow. 00:18:58 Speaker 1: With that thing lit by kind of the periphery of the light. 00:19:01 Speaker 2: Yeah, you're just wanting to barely see the little bit of red in their eye. And I would not touch it on them at all until I got within range of shooting a crossbow at them. And then when they were ready, I would lower it down on the thing and then you could shoot the crossbow. 00:19:18 Speaker 1: At what distance? 00:19:19 Speaker 2: From 30 yards in. We could shoot from 30 yards in, and we made our own arrows, and we had our own broomstick with a little float. 00:19:28 Speaker 1: And out of that crossbow, how are you attached, and how are you running a line attached to that bolt? 00:19:33 Speaker 2: We would just take the fiberglass fish bolts, get a piece of aluminum arrow that slid over it perfectly, and epoxy that in there, and epoxy a half-moon knock. 00:19:45 Speaker 1: In the end of it. Yep. 00:19:46 Speaker 2: And then we would drill a hole in the side of the aluminum. and into the thing. And I would epoxy a swivel in there with the ring sticking out. So you could run the line through the swivel down to like a muzzy point or like those points I use for the harpoons. So it was removable. Like the arrow would go into the gator and it would fall off, but it was on your line. 00:20:10 Speaker 1: And then you had them on a buoy. 00:20:11 Speaker 2: Whatever we do has to have a line attached. You can't just shoot an arrow at a gator without a line on it. 00:20:16 Speaker 1: That's the law part. And what was that line then on, an external spool? Yeah, I was using Zebco 808s. Okay. 00:20:25 Speaker 2: It was a friend of mine that was really good at it. He really coached me in it, and I started getting pretty good at it. But that was hard hunting. You were like, you'd get out at dark, and you were watching the sun come up. I mean, a lot of stuff could go wrong. those sometimes if the line dried out you know before we even hunt we would shoot it into the water get the line wet and reel it back up okay make it all moist and all and then if we went too long or didn't reel up right sometimes it would shoot out it would break the line and you would lose the whole rig sure yeah or if the a lot of times my customers would shoot at what they could see i try to coach them you can't shoot at the what you can see because you're seeing the head You have to visualize, like, behind the head where the valley is. That's what we call it. You'll see the back and the head, and there'll be a little valley. 00:21:15 Speaker 1: Yep. 00:21:15 Speaker 2: You want to aim at the valley. If the arrow hit the water in front of it, it was perfect because it would level out like a torpedo and just hub up right in them. 00:21:25 Speaker 1: Yep. 00:21:25 Speaker 2: And that would. 00:21:27 Speaker 1: Be the best shot. 00:21:28 Speaker 2: But nine times out of ten, people would shoot at the head. It would skip off the head, and you'd lose another arrow. 00:21:34 Speaker 1: Yep. Why did you guys move away from that crossbow-style hunting? 00:21:37 Speaker 2: Because everybody started doing it, and it was getting harder. Like, all of a sudden, we're going out gator hunting, you know, and that's when I was really starting to get into guiding. Then everybody and their brothers, there's red lights everywhere. Gators were getting really spooky. They evolved with the harpooning deal, and then they started learning about the red lights, and they got light shy. 00:22:00 Speaker 1: Oh, okay. You could hit a gator. 00:22:03 Speaker 2: a quarter of a mile away with your light, zoom, gone. 00:22:07 Speaker 1: Got it, got it. 00:22:08 Speaker 2: It was just hard. 00:22:09 Speaker 1: It's like a gator arm race. 00:22:10 Speaker 2: Yeah, so we had to figure out something else. 00:22:12 Speaker 1: What'd you move to from there? We moved to baiting then. 00:22:15 Speaker 2: You know, I was for years thinking about there's got to be a better way. There's got to be a better way. And it wears you out. My wife would answer my phone for me because I was nocturnal. I would be up all night gator hunting, and I'd sleep most of the day. 00:22:30 Speaker 1: Uh-huh. 00:22:31 Speaker 2: So I'm like talking to the once again, that processor. And there was these two old guys that kept bringing in these huge gators all the time to the processor. And I'm like, I'm like, what in the world are they doing? He said, Bob, they're doing something with chicken. 00:22:48 Speaker 1: And I'm like, really? 00:22:50 Speaker 2: He goes, I think they're putting spray foam in them. I'm like, really? And then a light bulb went off in my head because I'd been playing around with bait. But I was taking pieces of conduit out in the lake with a sledgehammer and pounding conduit into the bottom of the lake and attaching with a clothespin or something, hanging pieces of chicken out. But I'd have gators swim right up to it. I'm like, oh, here we go, here we go. And they swim up to it and see the metal and look at the device we had there, and then they didn't have nothing to do with it. 00:23:24 Speaker 1: So they're smart enough to know something's up. Everybody thinks a. 00:23:28 Speaker 2: Gator has a pea brain size. Their brain's the size of a pea. And they think they're dumb. But they're not dumb. They have that God-given natural will to live. 00:23:40 Speaker 1: To see a PVC pipe or whatever in the ground, there's a chunk of chicken hanging on it. He sees that and he knows it ain't right. 00:23:47 Speaker 2: Yeah, but I mean, in a way, I think that's part of it. But like the catfish guys that put the big trot lines out, They don't like them. My other buddy that bass guides with us, he kept telling us, they have little buoys with these little flags like they use in sprinkler companies or whatever. It's a little metal flag. They put it on there where they can see their buoy. 00:24:11 Speaker 1: To mark their catfish trot lines. 00:24:14 Speaker 2: For them, the gators are tuning in on that. They'll go right to it. I don't know. They're just smarter than we think. 00:24:21 Speaker 1: They'll go and work over those. Catfish trot lines. Yes. 00:24:25 Speaker 2: My younger son, James, we watched one one day. It was a big gator. The lake was low. It was like three foot deep. And there was a really long catfish. We were bass fishing, watching this. This big gator was literally backing up down the trot line. He would get to the fish. He would go under. He would come up, throw his head up, chomp that fish, rip it off the hook. And then he would start backing up to the next one. And the catfish guys hate them because their lines are extremely long. And when they get out there, they're all tangled up in big knots and you know, they almost have to redo the whole entire thing. 00:25:02 Speaker 1: Okay. So, so continue that story of the, that you were trying that you were trying staking the bait out and hanging it from something. Yeah, I did that for a while. 00:25:12 Speaker 2: And then, and yeah, I, I, It was later on when that man told me, oh, I think they're spray foaming them and sewing a chicken up. And I'm like, wow. It just went off in my head. So when I first started doing it, I was using regular-sized chickens. But when you put the spray foam in, they just went too big. I mean, if you want a really big gator, it was okay. But it would have to be a big gator to eat it right away. And there's a lot of tricks to it. I started going to cornish game hens which are small and then you could blow them up and you gotta have the law is you have to you can't we can't use a hook in the state. 00:25:53 Speaker 1: Yeah i think it's important that people understand you're not talking about a conventional j hook or a treble hook buried into a chicken. 00:26:00 Speaker 2: No and i asked i asked an old timer what would make the state come up with these rules like this because i used to say our rules are you might as well tell us to tie one hand behind our back and try to catch a gator. One, we got to hunt at night. Two, we can't use a hook in our bait. I'm like, what's the purpose of that? And he said, Bob, there was this old family, trapping family. I knew some of them. An old man named Norman Padgett and his family, they were, I'm talking about 50s, 60s or whatever. They did a lot of trapping. 00:26:37 Speaker 1: They did a lot. 00:26:38 Speaker 2: They sold a lot of Gator hide, there was a black market for gator hides. 00:26:43 Speaker 1: They made a living doing that. 00:26:44 Speaker 2: Poaching gators. Turtle trapping, gator trapping, you know, all that stuff. Well, they said the reason they used, our rule is we got to use a two-inch wooden peg, but I don't know why they came up with that. 00:26:57 Speaker 1: Catcher hook. 00:26:57 Speaker 2: Yeah, they came up with that. We'd make a leader with the two-inch wooden thing. He said the reason they used the wood peg is like, Bob, these guys were like poor. They didn't have no money. They would go kill an old marsh rabbit and go find a little stick and will it down like a point on each end and stick it up in the rabbit and have a little tether on the end of it. And that way, when the gators swallowed it, he couldn't burp it out and they would catch the gator and kill it with it. And those guys, the game commission got them in the meeting when they were starting the program. And they asked them how they do it. 00:27:38 Speaker 1: And that's how they wrote it up. They said they don't use a hook. 00:27:40 Speaker 2: They use this wooden peg. And according to that, man, that's how it happened. 00:27:46 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:27:46 Speaker 2: And to this day, we're not allowed to use a hook. We have to use a two-inch wooden dowel. 00:27:51 Speaker 1: Yeah. We sent one down to a gator. A Cornish game hen down to a gator. 00:27:58 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:27:59 Speaker 1: And we were in a situation where we were able to play the current. Like, we're in a river. Yeah. Swamp on each side. River. No one around. And we knew there was a gator way down the river. And we just sent that thing floating down like a presented bait. Yeah. And it got even with him. And, man, that sucker comes out. And I thought he'd go think about it for a minute or something. No, he didn't think about it. Comes out. And you had said to me, if he takes it, you'll see his tail come out and his head come out as he gulps it back. And he swam out. And... Yeah. Suck that thing down. Immediately. Yeah. 00:28:39 Speaker 2: We just barely got set up. Sometimes we got to sit for an hour or more and mess with it. But that one there, he was wanting it. 00:28:47 Speaker 1: Yeah. So then when you do that, explain how that then works out. Explain what your rig is. I know you're giving away all your trade secrets here. I don't really care anymore. 00:28:58 Speaker 2: I'm at the tail end of my career, and I don't really care. Everybody's figuring it out. But in the beginning, I was very secretive. 00:29:05 Speaker 1: Uh-huh. 00:29:06 Speaker 2: And I wouldn't tell people stuff. And then when I see people trying to imitate the baits we're doing, and I was getting mad, like, oh, my God. Well, then I realized there's more to it than just knowing how to make the bait. 00:29:19 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:29:20 Speaker 2: There's also you got to be far enough away from them where they don't think that the boat has anything to do with it. 00:29:26 Speaker 1: And my old gator boat. We ran into that, too. We ran into it where we kind of accidentally got by one. And presented that bait to him. That dude was like, uh-uh, man. He wasn't having it, he's like no way dude he's like he put together his head like that noise up there has something to do with that bait i don't want nothing to do with that bait. 00:29:44 Speaker 2: And then and then the other problem you'll have if you're too close yeah sometimes they might shoot out and grab it like that one we did and but they won't you have to have them swallow it right away yeah if they think that they got something to do with the boat or it's not right They don't know what it is. They'll grab the bait, and they'll turn around, and they'll just start swimming. I've had them do it before. They'll go and go and go, and they'll swim through trees or in vegetation. I've had them do it before where I have to lay in the boat and just dig vegetation for hours. That's probably why my back's messed up. 00:30:21 Speaker 1: I don't understand. Dig vegetation? 00:30:24 Speaker 2: Well, we used to have really thick weeds in the lake. They would swim through thick hydrilla. 00:30:28 Speaker 1: There's so much. Thick hydrilla, like, I mean. Carrying that bait, yeah. 00:30:31 Speaker 2: Yeah, and I would have to pull the line and dig, dig, dig, and I could go, like, I would have somebody else driving the boat. I'm laying on my belly in the front just digging, digging, digging, and then I'd move the boat three feet, dig, dig, dig. It might take me an hour to get close enough to the gator to get to him. 00:30:51 Speaker 1: And you got that rod rigged up where you got, how many, like, how many yards of, explain the setup. 00:30:59 Speaker 2: Well, I mean, that's the way I do it. A lot of people do it different. Some people braided line is expensive and we're using line reels that hold three, 400 yards of line. And the original reason I did it was because I didn't want to spend all that money, you know, putting that much line on the, on the reel. So I started, I used to do a lot of ocean fishing and I used my ocean technology. I just, He's 30 pound high visibility, yellow line. 00:31:28 Speaker 1: It was at night. 00:31:29 Speaker 2: It's easy to see it with the spotlight. So at the last 60 to 80 yards, I would have 150 pound test, like power pro line. And like when we were going to get the gator, if he swallowed it, you got to make sure they swallow it. I would just, we would just recover the line with hardly any tension. 00:31:47 Speaker 1: Yep. 00:31:47 Speaker 2: Until we get all the way down onto the braid and get a good, nice wrap. 00:31:52 Speaker 1: Yeah, you're basically just tracking him when you're pulling that line up. Like, he doesn't know yet something's going on. No. 00:31:58 Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, he kind of does, but you don't want to put pressure. Like, I'm always telling everybody, do not pressure him until we get on the main line, you know? And the other advantage of that is I try to tell people not to hunt on weekends. You know, we have a lot of bass tournaments here. I used to fish them all the time, too, but You know, we'd be out set up on a gator and we're 150, 200 yards away. And here comes a bass tournament and all these bass boats hauling butt and they're going across our line. Well, the mono would sink, you know, and they would run right over it. I've never had a boat hit my line. Okay. But, you know, a lot of people just go straight braid all the way. 00:32:39 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:32:40 Speaker 2: I think there's advantages to the mono. 00:32:43 Speaker 1: And how secure, like if he takes that Cornish game in. and he swallows it, how secure is that thing in there? It's really secure. Like that's a one-way passage. Yeah. 00:32:53 Speaker 2: I mean, very rarely I've ever had one burp it out. Yeah. And most of the time, if they do burp it out, it's like at the end of the fight when they're really tired and they're blowing air out and it's over and all of. 00:33:07 Speaker 1: A sudden, bloop, the bait will pop out. Got it. Yeah. 00:33:09 Speaker 2: But I've taken a 12-footer on a table before when we're cleaning it and put a welding glove on it. A lot of people use parachute cord, but like I said, I use my old ocean technology. I use like braided cable leader, probably about three foot. I took a welding glove and wrapped my hand around it in the beginning to see if it would come out. We opened the gator's mouth and you could not pull that bait out of that gator. 00:33:34 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. That kind of like, that's kind of where you landed on your strategy. Yeah. Which is, snagging hook. 00:33:44 Speaker 2: Oh yeah my all of a sudden i went from killing mediocre gators to killing trophy gators a lot people are like how are you killing all these gators yeah. 00:33:54 Speaker 1: And the new evolution now and you should talk about the new evolution now it's forward-facing sonar electronics yeah yeah explain that i mean you bet you're a bass fisherman i mean you've always used electronics to fish. 00:34:05 Speaker 2: Yeah yeah i mean it's People have been doing it for probably three or four years now. 00:34:13 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:34:13 Speaker 2: I've only, this is only my second or third year doing it. I still, I'm still learning. And it's some places are easier than others. When you get in a river or a channel where there's moving water, there's a little bit of turbulence. It's, it's harder to see good and more defined. But like last year it was like taking candy from a baby. Like it was like three to five foot deep in the lake. Um, And I could find a gator like 70 to 80 yards away and go all the way up to him within, I would get within 30 to 50 feet and start zooming in. 00:34:49 Speaker 1: Because he thinks he's hidden. Yeah, he's not moving. 00:34:52 Speaker 2: And I've seen it before too where I hit him with the hooks and they come off and they'll shoot one way. I'll see the surge of the water and the bubbles go. And I'll just, you know, calm down, get my hook back. And I'm just kind of trolling motor over there and keep looking. Sometimes my customers start yakking. They get bored back there. And I turn on... I got two units. They can see it in the back. They'll all be talking, talking. I'm just up there concentrating. And then I'm like, hey, I'm getting ready to cast on a big gator if you guys are interested. 00:35:22 Speaker 1: But the thing about that... I don't know if you realize this. You probably do. In the time we... The two days we just hunted. We hunted hard for two days. Very hard, yeah. So... I should point out that you... file your treble hooks barbless. You pinch your barbs. And I thought you pinched your barbs to be nice to the gator, but you're pinching your barbs. One reason is the skin's hard and it's hard to get it in there. It's hard to get a purchase on it. But I want to point out that the barb was pinched. The barbs were pinched. You did find a gator with forward-facing sonar early on. You found a gator with it. Yeah. Had a good idea how big it was, hooked it, we got it up, and popped the hook and let it go. Yeah. The other gators, the two gators we killed, and another gator we wrestled with, it didn't come into play. 00:36:24 Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, as far as coming out? 00:36:26 Speaker 1: No, no, I'm saying, those weren't forward-facing sonar gators. 00:36:30 Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, no, the two good ones we killed... Yeah, we did it without it. We might feel good about that too. 00:36:35 Speaker 1: Yeah, but I mean, I saw how effective it was and I was getting my mind like, well, that must be how it is now. Yeah. But then the way circumstances played out on our other, on the gators that were like the big, the big, nice gators we got, how circumstances played out, it was totally old school. Yeah. 00:36:52 Speaker 2: That's why I think, I mean, the first year I had it, it was the first hunt of the year. I got this guy, I think he was from Ohio. Yeah. I hadn't even got the Scout because I just got my boat rigged up. It was when I got the boat we used. It was brand new. I got all the electronics hooked up, and I didn't get the Scout, but I know the area good. I've been killing gators there for years, and I looked with my binoculars, and I'm like, oh, my God. It was like a big gator every 50 yards as far as you could see. So I turned on the sonar thing, and I'm trolling over there, and I'm looking for this thing, and I can't figure nothing out. I just remember saying, I've never killed a gator with this electronic bull crap. I'm just going back to the old way. And I troll and motored over where I saw a big gator go down and I threw a bait out and just troll and motored away. And he came up and it was just like that one you saw. He popped up, said, ooh, he ate it right away. The whole hunt was over in like 25 minutes. 00:37:53 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Nowadays, how many gator hunts are you doing nowadays? And I know you're actually, you're kind of half joking, but you keep talking about that you're not going to do this forever. But how many gator hunts are you doing? 00:38:09 Speaker 2: Right now, I think last year I killed like 16. And I used to kill, I didn't kill a whole bunch ever. I killed like 20 to 25 a year. 00:38:20 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:38:20 Speaker 2: And now I'm killing like 14 to 16 a year. And I don't even know if I'll hit that this year. 00:38:25 Speaker 1: So you turn business down now? 00:38:29 Speaker 2: Yeah, not really turn it down. I'm just more selective. A lot of my customers are repeat customers. 00:38:36 Speaker 1: But they got to draw the tag. Here's another thing I'd like you to explain is how the tag, like a tag holder, because getting a gator is a group effort. Oh, yeah. So when someone has a tag, the tag holder needs to be present. But it's not like the tag holder is themselves the only person participating. It's like the boat has a tag holder. Because everybody in the boat is going to come into play fighting the gator, right? So when you have clients, you have clients who have won lottery draw gator tags. That's the first step that has to happen. 00:39:13 Speaker 2: Some of them draw their own tags, and I don't need a tag holder then. Sometimes I've got people that want to go that don't. 00:39:22 Speaker 1: Maybe they didn't. 00:39:23 Speaker 2: You didn't get tags this year. I didn't either, but I had friends, and I put in a lot of people to get them. and the tag holder has to be in the boat yeah and everybody else has to buy a alligator trapping agent license yeah to be legal anybody touching any of the equipment has to. 00:39:39 Speaker 1: Have a license yeah so that's what we all had we had that trapping agent license. 00:39:42 Speaker 2: I even have one because i don't have a trapping license. 00:39:45 Speaker 1: Got it got it um so that's what you're doing now you're doing 14, 15 gators a year. I didn't know this until recently, and I was kind of surprised by it as well. Explain this egg thing you're involved in, egg collection. 00:40:03 Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know if they'll like it a whole lot. They don't like publicity, but, I mean, it's all legal. We just try to fly under the radar. It's almost like a military operation. 00:40:14 Speaker 1: Uh-huh. We hit a lake, we're in, we're moving fast, and we're out. But what, though? 00:40:21 Speaker 2: Well, the guys that I work for have been doing it since 1988 when it started. And there was one of the biologists that was in the beginning. He's retired now. He candles the eggs for us. And we have to have a biologist from the state overseeing us to make sure that we're not breaking laws in the numbers. Because it's all about the money. And they're always checking the count. I'll make sure. It's all about the money. The state makes a lot of money off of the eggs. But we use airboats. We have two crews. We cover the whole state, but not every body of water. Every year they give us a license and we have designated lakes we can go to and quotas for each lake. Some lake, you could get 100% of the nest, some are 50, some are 25. We have like three or four airboats on each crew a pontoon boat, we call it the egg boat, and a helicopter. So the helicopter has the two guys that run it that have been doing it since the beginning. They hire a helicopter guy and they spot the mess. 00:41:28 Speaker 1: From the air. 00:41:29 Speaker 2: And we all wear radio equipment like we got on here. And they're like, I need a boat. And we got to go take off and we're moving fast. We got to haul butt to the helicopter. And it's in Some of the places we go are not where people ride. Our airboats are designed to go in places that are bad. We carry chainsaws, machetes, axes. We get stuck a lot. We got to turn around and go back out the same way we came in. They look for the nest. The nest can be like that high. It's just piled up vegetation like a dome. 00:42:03 Speaker 1: So when you held your hand up, you're saying it could be four feet above the water. Yeah, three to four feet. 00:42:08 Speaker 2: So they'll find the nest, call us to them. And then when we go to them, And they also have, every nest has to be GPS and they keep a list. They're constantly checking with the guy, the biologist on the pontoon boat, where are we at with the numbers? Like how many do we have? They call it in the bank. Like if we break even, then we got to find some more nests and not open them. But he'll tell us, hey, we got 10 in the bank. Okay, so we can get 10 more and we keep going. And he finds some that we would, waste too much time trying to get to. They're in really bad places. So he puts them in the bank. But when we get there, we all carry a helper. And I just carry it like a parting stick for cattle. Because there's usually mama on every nest. Probably about 50, 60% of the time, there's no gators there. Between the helicopter noise, because sometimes the helicopter comes way down low to look and make sure it's a nest. And then when he calls us in, he gets up a little bit and backs away because their air will mess us up. He'll just sit there and point out the window. We get there, then we got to open up the nest. We take a little basket and put some of the nesting material in about maybe four inches deep, back it all down. 00:43:31 Speaker 1: And how many eggs will be in there? 00:43:33 Speaker 2: The average nest is like 20, about 20 to 30 eggs in a nest. But it's not unusual to find one with 40 or 50 eggs in it. 00:43:43 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:43:45 Speaker 2: They say only one in 10 in the wild will survive. 00:43:48 Speaker 1: That's what I imagine on this egg deal is you get like, there's a carrying capacity to the lake. Like the lake's going to support or the body of water is going to support a certain number of gators. And if you remove some percentage of eggs, it's not going to affect that end number of how many adult gators can be in the lake. 00:44:08 Speaker 2: Some people think, oh, we're taking all the eggs, so we're not going to have any gators. But just take Lake Okeechobee. 00:44:14 Speaker 1: For instance. 00:44:16 Speaker 2: We get a lot of eggs off Okeechobee. And the numbers are always way up. It's not really making a dent in the population. 00:44:25 Speaker 1: I can understand that. When salmon go up and spawn, it's not like every one of those eggs turns into a salmon. The system is going to support so many, and that's what the system's gonna support. And there's an excess of eggs in some ways. 00:44:41 Speaker 2: Plus, we're not finding every single nest. I mean, we try to go around the edge of the lake and stay within 100 yards of the edge. They can nest miles back in there. We don't know. 00:44:52 Speaker 1: So you get the eggs in a basket, then what happens? Yeah, so they don't need to be incubated, or they do. Yeah, they do. 00:45:01 Speaker 2: They take them to an incubator, but we got to be really careful. They tell us it's like a hurry up and then slow down. We got to hurry, hurry, hurry, but when we get to the nest, we got to slow down. 00:45:11 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:45:12 Speaker 2: Our helper, we take really good magic markers. Before they take the egg out of the nest, they got to mark it, a line across it where the top part is because there's an air bubble inside the egg, and that's where the embryo. 00:45:25 Speaker 1: Attaches to the shell. Okay. 00:45:28 Speaker 2: So if you roll it over... it will drown that. 00:45:31 Speaker 1: Oh, so you need to orient that egg in the same position. Yeah, they have to be. 00:45:35 Speaker 2: And every year, the first couple of days, the biologist on the boat, he's always, you know, somebody's not marking them right, you know? And I'm like, okay, okay, okay. Well, we get them all in there lined up right. And then we cover them back up with material. And we try not to haul too many. Like in my boat, I mean, if the pontoon boat's way out of position, I put as many as eight, ten crates of eggs in my boat. But we don't want too many because we're riding in rough areas and bouncing. We don't want to bounce them around and all that. Then we run them out to a pontoon boat. 00:46:10 Speaker 1: And then what happens to them? 00:46:12 Speaker 2: Then that's where that retired biologist is. They got a big box with a curtain over it, and he sticks his head in there, and he has to candle every egg. 00:46:21 Speaker 1: And not every egg is good. 00:46:23 Speaker 2: We might bring in a nest. 00:46:24 Speaker 1: There might not be any good eggs in it. Oh, really? Yeah. 00:46:27 Speaker 2: He's got some corrugated little pipe, and he looks at them, and if they're no good, they go right out that pipe. And then the other ones, they re-box them again into another cardboard box. Yeah, then they line them all up, and that's when they come up with their numbers, and that's when the biologists are there, and they know exactly how many numbers that came out of that nest. 00:46:50 Speaker 1: And those eggs are going to supply Gator Farms. 00:46:56 Speaker 2: That's correct yeah there's some really large gator farms and they're buying them they bought yeah they're buying them from the state yeah yep they're buying them that's where they get their you know what they need they buy them and they buy the hatchlings also and. 00:47:13 Speaker 1: You're working like um i don't even know the exact money but like you're working on a day rate you're working on a percentage of of the profit like what's your how what's your take. 00:47:24 Speaker 2: Yeah they pay us per egg okay and like i said there's two crews north and south so in the beginning they had a problem with competition guys are like i found this many i got this many and then i guess they were paying i wasn't in it then they were i think there was controversy and people almost fighting and everybody's trying to get more eggs to make more money and then they said enough of that enough of that So now they got a level playing field. We all get the same money. The two crews combined, we all get paid the same money. 00:47:56 Speaker 1: Got it. But ultimately, who sells the egg? The state sells the egg or the people that have the contract sell the egg? 00:48:05 Speaker 2: The people that have the contract, they are the ones with the license, but they're licensed by the state. And there's a board of the... Gator farmers, every year they have to vote. We're never guaranteed we're going to do it every year. 00:48:20 Speaker 1: I see. 00:48:20 Speaker 2: They could say, no, we don't want those guys anymore. 00:48:23 Speaker 1: I got it. They could fire us. 00:48:24 Speaker 2: But as long as we're doing good and their hatch rates 80% are better, then we don't have nothing to worry about. 00:48:31 Speaker 1: Got it. And there's also, in some areas, there's also a market for like a baby gator. 00:48:37 Speaker 2: Yeah, the same people that buy them do that. 00:48:41 Speaker 1: Yeah. And that's another collection thing that happens roughly around the same time of season. Yeah. 00:48:48 Speaker 2: Well, like eggs all hatch like in September. Like we do the egg collection in July. Usually all the nests are made. We start on the first of July or last day of June. And we do it for like two or three weeks solid. You know, we're going every day. 00:49:03 Speaker 1: We're traveling all over the state. Yeah. Getting them. 00:49:05 Speaker 2: And then there's a little bit of a break. September 1st is when we're allowed to get the hatchlings. 00:49:11 Speaker 1: Yeah. And. 00:49:13 Speaker 2: Usually by September 11th or 12th, according to the guys I work for, that's when all of them are hatched. 00:49:19 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:49:19 Speaker 2: And then we go looking and we can't wait too long because everything eats them. Snakes eat them, blue herons, bass will eat them because they're cute. They're just little, small little babies. 00:49:33 Speaker 1: Do you feel that gator numbers... Are gator numbers still... going up. I mean, I know that maybe there's concern that there's fewer giant gators around or people see fewer giant gators, but it just seems to me that there are. This is just anecdotal from my perspective. It seems that there's a staggering number of alligators and I cannot picture how the systems can support the pounds of alligators. Meaning, you look at a bend in the river, well, Let me put it another way first. The first day we were out, I told a couple of friends of mine. I was like, they're literally, literally, during the time I was there, there was no time when you weren't seeing. There was no time when you weren't looking at gators. For hours and hours and hours on end, there was always gators. Yeah. And it'd be that you'll look down the river bank in some places, in some places, especially the place we went the first time down, down the river bank, you look and there's, there's nine just lined up like cars parked in a driveway. We went through a lock and there's sort of like this, this rock wall area of a lock. We went through the lock and just parked and there's six. 00:51:04 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:51:06 Speaker 1: And it's a lock. Loud. Yeah. 00:51:10 Speaker 2: They're not afraid of that. There's also water flowing through. And gators always congregate where water's coming through a structure or whatever. 00:51:18 Speaker 1: They're drawn to that movement. 00:51:19 Speaker 2: There's a lot of garfish there. There's a lot of food. There are dead fish coming through, turtles. And they'll eat the garfish. The garfish are so thick, they catch them and eat them. 00:51:28 Speaker 1: Yeah. But the main point I was making, it's just it seems like there's so many. I remember turkey hunting down here a couple years ago. We'd just go for a little drive now and then. And there's a ditch, like a drainage ditch. And no big body of water around, but it's a long drainage ditch. And that's lined with gators. I mean, it's like, does it seem to you like there's more and more and more? Or is it, are our populations kind of like flat and stable by this point? 00:51:56 Speaker 2: I think the numbers are, there's more gators now than when I was young. 00:52:00 Speaker 1: Sure. 00:52:01 Speaker 2: Because of the, you know, the way they protected them and all. but there's tons of seven to nine foot gators okay but because of the hunting and everybody evolving with the hunting more people are baiting gators and stuff it is getting harder to find gators over 10 foot you think so yeah i mean look at how many gators we looked at and. 00:52:23 Speaker 1: Yeah but we had a lot of gators give us the slip yeah i mean you see them way off yeah I mean, you can't run a tape measure on them all, but we saw a lot of gators that were like, well, there's a nice gator, and he's gone because he's 100 yards away. 00:52:36 Speaker 2: Yeah, like you said, the bigger gators are smart. 00:52:40 Speaker 1: And then we hunted two days and got two gators that were over 10 feet. Yeah. But you feel like even with that, you feel like there's a lower number. Oh, yeah. 00:52:49 Speaker 2: Back in the early 2000s, the water was low at the mouth of the Kissimmee River where we went out yesterday. 00:52:54 Speaker 3: Okay. 00:52:55 Speaker 2: And we had like 14 foot surf rods with those same treble hooks and we could wing them almost all the way across the river. And it was, it was nothing to catch a 12 foot alligator. 00:53:06 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:53:06 Speaker 2: You could catch them all the time. I mean, I killed them up to 13. There's a couple of buddies of mine got 12 footers mounted in their houses in Wyoming. 00:53:15 Speaker 1: Yeah. Where it was, it was easy. But now looking back, I'm like, wow, I miss those days. Yeah. We, we should establish that, that, uh, Explain what a top end gator is. 00:53:28 Speaker 2: You mean like a trophy gator? 00:53:30 Speaker 1: Well, what is the biggest that makes sense? Like you hear people say numbers, but it's probably not true. Like you even said, people say, oh, it's 15 feet. Like it probably wasn't 15 feet. 00:53:38 Speaker 2: Well, you know, I'm around bass boaters. I've fished bass tournaments forever. And I can't tell you how many people have said, I saw this gator as long as my 21 foot bass boat. And I'm like, okay, yeah. But the state record's only 14 foot. I think it's like six and a half or something right now. 00:53:55 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:53:55 Speaker 2: So it's not, I mean, I wouldn't. 00:53:58 Speaker 1: But a 13-foot gator is. 00:54:01 Speaker 2: Is a massive, old gator. 00:54:02 Speaker 1: A massive gator, yes. A 12-foot gator is achievable. Yes. An 11-foot gator, if you work hard, you'll find one. Yeah. And like you're saying, the eight or nine-foot gator, they're just everywhere. 00:54:15 Speaker 2: Yeah, if you wanted just a meet and hide gator, an eight to nine-foot gator, seven to nine-foot gator, or even six. The smaller they are, the better they eat. And the smaller they are, their hides aren't all beat up. Because the old gators, they get cancer. They've been fighting. They're missing limbs. They got all kind of blemishes in their hide. The best hides are probably a six to eight foot gator. 00:54:42 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the thing I want to touch on real quick. We went to a gator. We dropped our gators at a gator processor. So what's the name of that outfit we went to? Florida Trophy Gators. 00:54:54 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:54:56 Speaker 1: This guy, he's primarily, he was explaining, Wade was explaining, primarily, we're a gator taxidermy business. But we skin gators, we process meat, we do all the other stuff, but kind of our focus is gator taxidermy. Yeah. But you don't need to do that. You can drop off a gator. One, they got big walk-in coolers, so you get your gator taken care of and cool, processed in a hurry, butchered. They portion the meat out. They run the meat through a tenderizer. They defat it, and you get back one-pound packages of ready-to-eat gator meat. Yep. We dropped off that one. It was 11.7, am I remembering right? Yep. 11.7, and I can't remember what he said. We were expecting maybe we're going to wind up with 70, 80 pounds of gator meat off that gator. But he's got all over there, there's signs right now, In Magic Marker. Yeah. Not buying gators. Yeah. Okay. Tell people what's up with why there's signs saying not buying gators. 00:56:07 Speaker 2: I know some of it, not all of it, but I know that this is the first year I've ever seen that. 00:56:13 Speaker 1: This is the first year? Yeah. 00:56:14 Speaker 2: I've never seen this in my life before. I mean, the gator market is getting flooded. Because all the gator farms and there's more processors, there's more people doing it. I know Wade was telling us that his freezers were full of meat. They supply restaurants and stuff around here too. I don't know for what reason or whatever, but the meat market's flooded. He was sitting on meat from last year. He's like, that's it. We can't buy any more gators. And the Hyde's because of the gator farms and and the hide market the hides are not even worth anything. 00:56:55 Speaker 1: Anymore yeah i had another guy i just met randomly a guy from florida that hunts gators used to hunt gators and he was explaining to me he says man the whole wild gator hide thing the market's dead yeah he said it's dead because of farm gators because farm gators can produce a a consistent perfect product yeah and wild gators can't compete with farm gators so he says we used to kill wild gators and make good money on hides good money on meat but now you got these people making cookie cutter perfect gators and no one. 00:57:30 Speaker 3: Wants the gator leather from a wild gator some of the gator farms are huge and one of them i know of they kill 500 to a thousand gators every day monday through friday they're processing that many alligators you know And they still have a good market because they're dealing with the. 00:57:48 Speaker 2: Hide buyers are like the tanneries in Italy and stuff. 00:57:52 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. So when he has that, so here's a guy that he does some restaurant supply stuff. And, you know, you drop it off, you get a form. You're like, I want my skull all cleaned up. I want my meat. They'll ship the meat to you. I want to get the Gator stuffed. I want it made for leather, for boots. Like you get all this kind of stuff taken care of, but he's not buying when they, like, if you go back a few years and tell me some of the ways that like, what would be some of the prices that you could bring in? Like you go on a Gator hunt and you just, you don't want nothing to do with the Gator. You get a 10 foot Gator. You'd go in and it'd be, he'd buy it for what per foot or what per foot, not just him, but the market in general. Yeah. 00:58:38 Speaker 2: Original before the Gator farms got really big. they wanted the bigger Gators. 00:58:42 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:58:43 Speaker 2: You know, like the 10, 11, 12 footers, they were paying more. And, you know, I had problems with my business years ago and got down on money and we weren't, we weren't guiding as much. We were, I was selling the hides to Wade's dad. 00:58:58 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:58:58 Speaker 2: And that was what was putting bread on the table for me. I mean, we were getting like 20, $ 30 a foot or more for the big, the more, the bigger the Gator, the more we got, got it you know and he was just. 00:59:10 Speaker 1: So you could go out some night get a 10 footer and just. 00:59:12 Speaker 2: Walk in five or six hundred dollars cash money in my hand right there right now you like the other couple years ago i had one tag left wade and i went and killed a nine foot gator i think i got I think $ 180 or something. 00:59:27 Speaker 1: Got it. And you don't got to, after you get it, you don't do nothing. 00:59:30 Speaker 2: No, you just bring it there. They buy the whole thing. 00:59:33 Speaker 1: They lift it off, throw a tape measure on it, and pay you by foot. Yeah. So do you feel that since he's now not buying gators and the market's different, do you feel that that is going to reduce interest in gator hunting? Or do you think there's such a recreational gator hunting thing culture that it doesn't matter that they're valueless. 00:59:59 Speaker 2: No i don't think it's ever the hunting's ever going to go down i think it's a novelty kind of a hunt uh-huh a buddy of mine sam heaton he he helps me sometimes he tells everybody he's hunted all over the world like you and he's like this is the most unique hunt in the north american continent there's nothing else like. 01:00:17 Speaker 1: It yeah it's it's like it's hunting and fishing combined. 01:00:20 Speaker 2: Yeah people are like amazed by it and in the danger element you know Yeah. I've been doing it for a long time. 01:00:27 Speaker 1: Do you think it's dangerous? It can be. I didn't get like a danger vibe off it, but you've been doing it a long time. 01:00:34 Speaker 2: You scared me when you were climbing in that tree, when that one was hung up and you almost fell. 01:00:39 Speaker 1: I was like, he'll grab you. Yeah. 01:00:41 Speaker 2: I'm like, he's kind of upset. You know, he's got hooks in him and you were in a bad spot. Yeah. 01:00:48 Speaker 1: But you've never had a, I mean, like I was saying, it didn't seem dangerous. Cause you know what? Cause you've seen it a bunch. 01:00:54 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:00:55 Speaker 1: So you're like, well, don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that. But I could see if I just went out and I had never done it before, I could see snagging one of them suckers and getting in real trouble. 01:01:04 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:01:04 Speaker 1: But you're like, okay, step one is this. Step two is that. Step three is this. And there's a lot of, like, checks along the way. Yeah. Until toward the end, you're, like, taping his, you know, you got his mouth taped shut. You sever his spinal cord. Yeah. When he comes on the boat, he's cashed, but it's a process. I didn't get a danger vibe off it because you just had a way that you know how you do it. 01:01:32 Speaker 2: It's more dangerous when we do the eggs than it is the hunting. 01:01:36 Speaker 1: I'm sure. 01:01:38 Speaker 2: The females, they have that natural maternity thing where they're going to protect their young. 01:01:45 Speaker 1: Do guys come to you? Do you have clients that come to you and... They're like, hey, I'm going to try to get these tags. I'm going to apply for the lottery draw for Okeechobee. And when I do it, I'll come find you. 01:02:01 Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of people call me up because they want to know because there's so many areas we can put in for gator tags. 01:02:07 Speaker 1: They want to know where to put it. 01:02:08 Speaker 2: Yeah, so I tell them the areas that I like to hunt and they'll call me and put in for those areas. 01:02:15 Speaker 1: And you've kind of, like I said, I can't tell how much you're joking or not. How many... How many years more gator hunting are you going to do? Oh, shoot. I don't know, man. Like, take a stab, man. Like, in 20 years? You've seen me, man. Are you going to be gator hunting in 20 years? 01:02:30 Speaker 2: No, I'm not going to be gator hunting in 20 years. I'll be lucky to be alive in 20 years. 01:02:33 Speaker 1: Okay, you're going to be gator hunting in 10 years? Well, you've seen my helper, Garrett. That's the thing. Now you've got a young guy rolled in. 01:02:42 Speaker 2: Well, James used to hunt my son. He used to be my helper. Me and him could conquer the world when we're together in the Mars. But like Garrett, he has more time to do it. And he did awesome. This is the first time. I used him this year the first time. 01:02:57 Speaker 1: He's great. He's great. 01:02:58 Speaker 2: And I can't lift the gators. 01:03:01 Speaker 1: I can't. 01:03:02 Speaker 2: My back doctor's telling me if I keep doing it, I'm going to end up in a wheelchair. 01:03:06 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:03:07 Speaker 2: You know, I'm just, as long as I have a good helper, I'm going to keep going. 01:03:10 Speaker 1: Yeah. Because eventually you can just sit back and be the brains. 01:03:13 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's kind of what I started doing with Garrett. I mean, he's doing good. You just point this way, point that way. 01:03:19 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:03:20 Speaker 2: That spot and stalk we did yesterday. I used to love doing that stuff, you know, and I can't. 01:03:26 Speaker 1: What he's talking about is what Captain Bob's talking about. We had a gator down the beach from us. And this gator was no way, no hogging to take that bait. No, he wasn't going to. Got out of the boat, snuck down. real tall grass and brush, snuck down and basically crept in on him. Yeah. And we were like easing ahead, easing ahead. Pretty soon you can see his head out there in the marsh and then planted a hook. Yeah. Hooked him, then ran out, waved the boat down. The boat came down, jumped on the boat, chased the gator down river because he was pulling drag, man. 01:04:02 Speaker 2: Not very many people do this spot and stalk on alligators. 01:04:05 Speaker 1: But I like it. 01:04:06 Speaker 2: That's a cool thing. 01:04:07 Speaker 1: Yeah, you used to do that, didn't you? Got some slower to it, too. I just can't. 01:04:10 Speaker 2: I have nerve damage in my back, and I can't walk good. 01:04:14 Speaker 1: So of all the stuff you guide for, I asked you about this this morning. You didn't give me a satisfactory answer. Of all the stuff you guide for... Oh, there it comes, raining. Better check windows in cars. I mentioned when I came in, we're recording this. I was... telling the guys I was telling Seth and Max about this 1928 Okeechobee flood and I'm pulling it up and reading about it and I'm reading about it and it happened to be today's date today's date is the it's the 98th anniversary of the Okeechobee flood which they debate the numbers but drowned About 2,500 people. Yeah. South of Lake Okeechobee. 01:05:06 Speaker 2: Yeah, from Clewiston all the way up to Pahokee. 01:05:10 Speaker 1: And I didn't know this either. There's a mass grave near here that has about 1,600 people in it. 01:05:15 Speaker 2: It was really close to where we went fishing today. 01:05:18 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:05:19 Speaker 2: I actually knew a guy that was alive. Not in that flood. Maybe it was. No, it was when they were building the lock in Clewiston before they had the dike complete. He was a young boy. That guy's passed away now. But the Army Corps engineers had this big, it was kind of like a, it was like a houseboat kind of a thing. And there was a hurricane coming. There was no really good paved roads. The roads going into the Everglades that are paved now, they weren't there yet. And they were, they had a little settlement there. They were living in like a little makeshift house thing down there in The Army Corps people went down there and got the family because that boy, that guy that was telling me the story was a young boy then. They got him over there and got him in that boat with them. And they tied the boat up. The lock wasn't even complete, but it has two big concrete walls. The doors weren't on or nothing. And they tied the boat up really good in the middle of it because of the hurricane. And all he remembered was for half the hurricane, the boat was tilted one way. And then the eye of the storm came and it went upright. And then it went back the other way. That was, yeah, no, that was after the flood. That was after the flood. 01:06:34 Speaker 1: We'll get off the subject, but I'm just bringing it up because it's raining on the anniversary of that flood. But I was reading, too, that a lot of people were killed by water moccasins because people were up on rooftops and stuff. 01:06:47 Speaker 2: Yeah, hanging on to trees and everything. 01:06:48 Speaker 1: All these snakes are also up, and they're trying to crawl out of the water, and they're crawling out of the water where there are people, and people are getting killed by moccasins. Yeah. Terrible. 01:07:00 Speaker 2: There's an island down between Belle Glade and Clewiston. It's called Ridda Island. There was a settlement there. There was no heavy equipment then. Everybody, they were just old. 01:07:14 Speaker 1: School. 01:07:15 Speaker 2: They had mules and stuff. They were disking up muck, making an earthen barrier to have a farm. They built houses. There was a post office there. That's one of the areas where you're saying they were Houses got trashed and the people had to keep going up in the house and holding on in the attics, holding on to trees. 01:07:35 Speaker 1: It was really a bad situation. You see this hat says Bear Grease? Yeah. That's a podcast we do in our network. It's hosted by a guy named Clay Newcomb, who's a Southerner. I texted him today. It's a podcast about Southern culture, Southern history. I texted him today and told him he needs to do a Bear Grylls series or an episode on the Okeechobee flood. And I think that he will. That'll be cool. When it comes out, you'll have to listen to it. Let's get back to my last question. You've guided ducks, snipe, crappies, bluegills, or shellcrackers. Yeah. Gators. I asked you, what, what do you like more? Like what, what one do you wake up and you're most, you're most excited about the day? 01:08:29 Speaker 2: For guiding or me personally? 01:08:31 Speaker 1: Just for how good of a time you're going to have that day. 01:08:34 Speaker 2: I like guiding hunters more than fishermen. 01:08:37 Speaker 1: Really? 01:08:37 Speaker 2: But I am a fisherman. I like fishing. People ask me, do you ever get burnt out with fishing? 01:08:42 Speaker 1: I'm like, no. 01:08:43 Speaker 2: I get burnt out taking people fishing, but I don't get burnt out personally fishing. 01:08:48 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:08:49 Speaker 2: But, I mean, if I had to give everything up, I would fish. 01:08:53 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:08:53 Speaker 2: Is that satisfying? 01:08:55 Speaker 1: Yeah. But you like gator hunting? 01:08:57 Speaker 2: I love gator hunting. I've been messing with gators ever since I was a little kid. My dad used to whip me with his fishing rod. Yeah. 01:09:05 Speaker 1: I do got one last question for you. What would be, as a guide, if you could convey one message to the clients out there in the world? It's like you're the guide and you're able to speak Like, this is the guide. I wish all you people understood this. Hmm. I don't know. 01:09:30 Speaker 2: That's a hard one. I'm kind of a guide that I try to accommodate everybody. 01:09:36 Speaker 1: No matter where they're at. Okay. 01:09:38 Speaker 2: I go out of my way to do that, and I think that's one of the reasons why I've been a successful guide. 01:09:43 Speaker 1: You don't have a single, you don't have one pet peeve that you could pass along to America's clients. 01:09:54 Speaker 2: No, no, I don't think so. 01:09:57 Speaker 1: Really? Yeah. That's a polite guy, man. 01:09:59 Speaker 2: I am very, people always tell me, why are you so nice? 01:10:02 Speaker 1: I don't know. No, you're a nice guy. 01:10:03 Speaker 2: I just like to see people get what they're after, and I work my tail off to do it. 01:10:09 Speaker 1: So like today, we did a little fishing today, and Seth over here behind the, you can't see him over here. He was having a heck of a time getting that hook hung up on them rocks. What'd you think about that? I knew it was going to happen. It was all right. You were fine with that? All them rocks he was hooking? 01:10:27 Speaker 2: I guess the thing that ticks me off, you want to really know what ticks me off, okay? 01:10:31 Speaker 1: Please, yeah, I do want to know what ticks me off. Seth outfished me. I don't know if you noticed that. Yeah, he did good. 01:10:37 Speaker 2: He jumped off a couple of tarpon and had some hits. 01:10:41 Speaker 1: Okay, anyhow, here's the pet peeve. I want to end on a negative. We get people in the bait shop. You know, I'm half awake. I got my coffee. I'm trying to think about where I'm going, what I'm doing. 01:10:54 Speaker 2: And they get in the boat and they start telling me stories. They're fishing stories. 01:10:58 Speaker 1: Oh, they're fishing stories. 01:10:59 Speaker 2: And like that, I don't like. None of the guys like it. 01:11:03 Speaker 1: I mean, my buddy. You know why they're doing that? They're doing that because they want you to take them seriously. 01:11:10 Speaker 2: But then when you see them handle the equipment, you're like... It's a miracle. It'd have to be a kamikaze fish. 01:11:16 Speaker 1: Yeah, because they're sitting there. They're like, here it is. He's like the guide. He probably thinks I'm some rube. I need to tell him that I'm a man's man too. I'm going to show him my fishing pictures. 01:11:29 Speaker 2: It could be. But they don't realize we're stressing in the morning. People don't realize this. They think, oh, you're a fishing guide. What a dream job. You just take people fishing. I'm like, yeah, but it's not a dream job. we're stressing right now. The lake is not fishing the best that it ever did. And when, when they come in there, they're introducing themselves and telling us their stories. And I'm thinking my mind's going 90 miles. Should I go here? Should I go there? Where should I go? You know, I need to get this done and I'm trying to listen to them and remember their name. And I'm like, ah, you know, but it's stressful. 01:12:05 Speaker 1: Let's role play for a minute. You don't say nothing. I'm the guide. You're the client. We get in the boat. I go, listen, Okay, you're the client. I'm the guide. I'm like, listen, I know. I know you are a fantastic fisherman. I already know. You don't need to tell me. Maybe you'll just kill that whole thing right then and there. If you just come clean, I know you're the best fisherman that's ever walked. You're the greatest fisherman that's ever walked. I'm blessed to be in a boat with you. I don't even need to see the proof because I just know. 01:12:39 Speaker 2: What really killed it? Cracks those up. We always laugh about it. The other guys do. The guys that get in the boat, and they're all jazzed up. They're coming to Lake Okeechobee. 10-pounders are jumping in the boat. I'm feeling that 10-pounder today. And right away, I'm like, probably ain't going to happen. But the guys that come and are all amped up, and they're bouncing off the wall, about catching a 10-pounder, They don't do too great. The guy that comes and just wants to relax and is enjoying being out there and all laid back. 01:13:10 Speaker 1: They're the ones that have the best days. It never fails. Got it. Ultimately, to seriously end it on a positive note, to clients out there, relax. Take in the experience. You don't need to prove nothing to me. I'm going to try to help you have a great day fishing. 01:13:32 Speaker 2: You know, that's what our job is. 01:13:34 Speaker 1: Let's just keep it simple. Yeah. This isn't a showdown. We're not having a showdown here. 01:13:39 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:13:40 Speaker 1: I do enjoy it, though. No, you must. You've been doing it a long time. You're good at it, man. It's fun to hang out with you in the boat. Tell people real quick how to find you. My business name is Okeechobee Charters. 01:13:51 Speaker 2: You can find it on the web, okeechobeecharters.com. And I'm also hooked up with Garrett's Tackle in Okeechobee. 01:13:59 Speaker 1: You can call them. Yeah. Well, it's Gerrard's. 01:14:02 Speaker 2: Well, their real name is Gerrard's. Everybody calls it Gerrard's. 01:14:05 Speaker 1: Oh, Gerrard's. It is? Oh, I'm sorry. I read that wrong. And that's where you go to get your morning coffee. Yeah. 01:14:13 Speaker 2: In our bait and all. 01:14:14 Speaker 1: In our ice. 01:14:15 Speaker 2: We get all our supplies for the day. 01:14:17 Speaker 1: So for the gator end of things, when is the gator draw in Florida? 01:14:21 Speaker 2: The gator draw is usually in May. Around May 1st, we got to get ready to draw. I don't know. Sometimes they change it a little bit, but. 01:14:29 Speaker 1: So someone might want to shoot you an email prior to that date. Yeah. 01:14:33 Speaker 2: April to May, you need to contact me. 01:14:35 Speaker 1: You're walking through what they need to do. Yeah. 01:14:37 Speaker 2: And I can show, I'll tell them, I help people fill out the forms because there's a lot of stuff to fill out. 01:14:44 Speaker 1: And then if anyone needs some Gator meat, hit me and Seth up. Yeah. 01:14:47 Speaker 2: You guys got a bunch of meat. 01:14:49 Speaker 1: We're sitting pretty rich on Gator meat right now. All right, man. Thanks for coming on the show, buddy. Appreciate it. It's been a real pleasure and a real pleasure to watch you do your thing and Man, I learned a ton. We were talking about that before we came over, how much we learned over that couple days. 01:15:02 Speaker 2: I'm glad you enjoyed it. 01:15:04 Speaker 1: Thank you. 01:15:05 Speaker 2: I want to get you on that airboat one day. 01:15:07 Speaker 1: I've been on your airboat. Not this one. I've been on a airboat with you. Not that airboat with you. Thanks, everybody. Thank you.

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