³ÉÈËXÕ¾

19-year old Tim Stroh caught a 12-foot, 800-lb. alligator in the Florida everglades. (AP Photo/File)

The state of Florida is known as ‘gator country’, but rarely has anyone ever seen an alligator as big as the one Tim Stroh caught last week.

Stroh, 19, caught a 12-foot, 3-inch, 800-pound mammoth of an alligator last Friday, with only a simple bass rod.

“I had my drag set low enough to where he didn’t break the line. He fought for like a minute or two, and then he just went down towards the bottom. My dad located where he the line was at, and my dad took a piece of rope with an even bigger trouble hook and threw it out past him and dragged it along the bottom and snagged him,” Stroh told the Ron & Don Show on 97.3 ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ FM earlier this week.

The gator didn’t give up without a fight though, as Stroh’s father and his associate helped Tim try and reel in the enormous reptile.

“He came out and was just popping his jaw trying to bite the side of the boat and stuff. It was pretty crazy,” explained Stroh.

Despite the dangers of messing with such a massive animal, Stroh used a device called a “bang stick” to finish off the catch once and for all.

“It’s a pole, at the end of it it has a little piece of metal that slides, and a bullet goes into it. If he was actually biting on to us before we bang-sticked him, he could have pulled us under and he would have easily killed [us].”

Stroh plans on hanging up the prized catch on his wall, considering his father is a taxidermist by trade. With over 250 pounds of gator meat stored in their freezer, the Stroh family won’t be going hungry anytime soon.

“We like to fry it on a skillet.”

By Michael Simeona
MyNorthwest.com Editor