A man and his daughter in a sea kayak had a frightening encounter with an alligator they will not soon forget.
Lance Burgos was on a camping trip with his daughter at Lake Fausse Point State Park along with a friend and his daughter. In front of the campsite they could see a pool noodle that had been rigged like a catfish jug darting from side to side and decide to find out what was up.
So they took to the kayaks — Brugos and his daughter in one with the other father-daughter pair in the other — to see what might be at the end of that line. What they discovered was no catfish.
Burgos had his GoPro running when he pulled on the line to discover the snout of a massive alligator. The father quickly told the girl to get her hands in the boat as he dropped the line and peddled that kayak as fast as he could. It looked as though that gator could have easily flipped that kayak.
“I was in a 13-foot Hobie Outback, and that thing had 3 foot of head that was a foot and a half across,” Burgos told the Time-Picayune.
When he posted the video to Youtube, it caught the attention of local as well as national news outlets. Some questioned whether it was humane to leave an alligator with a hook in its mouth, but Burgos said he spoke to a local biologist who told him this sort of thing happens all the time.
“The hooks and line disintegrate in the stomach acid of the animals, and the gators go about their business,” he wrote on Youtube. “He patrols and regulates the state park, and was made aware of the incident. I was reassured that the animal would be fine.”
Photo credit: Youtube
