I grew up fishing at Lake Millwood. We brought home ice chests full of brim and crappie every late spring. Lots of good times.
Little did we know this guy was there too. To get that big he must be at least 25 or 30 years old. Sure glad I never fell out of the jon boat. 
It took 5 people to get this monster in the boat.
Break out the deep fryer!
I had no idea that there were alligators up in Arkansas; Thought they were pretty much isolated in Louisiana and Florida (and I suppose some in the marshes along the Gulf Coast areas of Mississippi & Alabama) but didn’t know they ranged as far north as AR.
There’s always a problem with fisherman cleaning fish near the boat ramp. The heads and guts go in the water. That attracts snapping turtles, snakes and gators. Can make the waters around the boat ramp dangerous.
We used to curse the turtles for stealing our trotline or yo yo catch. We ran yo yo’s at night. You had to get back out there and check them every couple hours. Otherwise there’d be a fish head dangling from the yo yo. Now I wonder if gators were getting our fish?
Running yo yo’s is always spooky at night. Can’t see much except where the spotlight shines. Easy to hit a stump or log with the boat. All those animals making noise at night. We’d stay up till at least 4AM going out and checking the catch every 2 hours.
When I was a kid, I spent a fair amount of time in the Okeefenokee with my grandparents. My GF had a favorite fishing hole, way back in the swamp that he’d been using for 40 years.
When I was about 12, we were on the way to the swamp and stopped at the store to get a new anchor. A little mushroom-shaped thing from K-mart, couldn’t have cost 8 dollars. My GF threw it in the front of his boat on a pile of rope, and we headed off.
While motoring to the fishing spot, my grandfather told me to make sure to tie the anchor rope to the boat. I did. When we got there, he asked if I had tied the rope to the boat. I assured him I did. He grabbed the pile of rope, anchor and all, and tossed it overboard. The anchor went “splunk” and headed for the bottom. The rope stayed floating on the water, tied to the boat.
He looked around and me and said “I thought I told you to tie this anchor to the rope.”
No, he had been very clear, and my grandfather was not a man to disobey or misunderstand. I did EXACTLY as I had been told. At that point, however, it **was **making some sense to have tied the anchor to the rope…
“Well, get my anchor.”
" HUH?"
“Strip. Get my anchor. I just bought it.”
“Seriously?”
His look over his glasses was classic, and signaled that all fun and happiness had left the area, and to not comply was unthinkable. I stripped to my underwear and slid into the tobacco-colored water of the Okeefenokee, visibility 1 inch, where I knew alligators, snapping turtles, and snakes lived. Luckily it was only about 6 or 7 feet deep - I was barely 5, and with him feeling around with a boat paddle, we finally found it. I was scared shitless the whole time, but couldn’t let him know. His disappointment would have been far worse than a spanking.
It was a quiet rest of the day, but the week got better with catching fish, playing with friends, and we eventually went back home to their place in Savannah. That night we had a big gathering of relatives, and the story of the anchor came up. My GF’s brother looked and him with shock and some anger. “You mean back in our spot where Oscar lives?” My GF tried to shush him, but my uncle went on, telling us all how this 15 foot gator had been living in that spot for years, attacking their boat on more than one occasion in the past 40 years. My god, he said, we saw the worst gator fight of our lives back there. Two giants rolling and attacking each other for 45 minutes…
Oh, he went on about the terrors of the deep in there, and I just got sicker and sicker to my stomach. Everyone was hugging me, and telling me how lucky I was, and on and on.
I have been very wary of gators and their territory ever since. Scared shitless is the official term, I think.
Over 30 years later, I was sitting around with my parents and grandparents, and I started telling my son this story. My mom rolled her eyes, and said to her father “isn’t it about time you told him?”
Turns out my grandfather and his brother made all that stuff up, and everyone knew it but me. For 30 years.
All that time I held a bit of a grudge against him for endangering me like that, but as he explained - all our noise and boat motor and splashing would have scared any gator away, plus all of his poking around with the paddle would have scared off any turtles or stubborn gators on the bottom anyway.
Plus, he reminded me that I had almost gotten eaten by Oscarthe year before, and I had done that all by myself.
But that’s a whole 'nother story.
West into Texas too. They had a lot of them in the area where I went skydiving. Kinda behooved you to plan your drift.