Mississippi gator hunters bag a record-setting leviathan after a 7-hour battle: 'It was pandemonium. It was chaos.'

A record was set and certified in August 2017 for the longest alligator bagged in Mississippi. The beast weighed 766.5 pounds and measured 14 feet and 3/4 inches tail to snout.

It turns out there was yet a greater monster still lurking in the murk.

With an inkling of where a "particularly territorial" alligator at least 12 feet long could be found out on the Yazoo River, Will Thomas, Don Woods, Tanner White, and Joey Clark ventured out Friday in search of their gator and glory, reported the Washington Post.

Woods, among those to receive a tag by lottery for this year's 10-day hunting season, told the Clarion Ledger, "We got on the water right at dark. ... It was a calm night. We saw a lot of 8-footers, 10-footers, but that's not what we were after."

Around 9 p.m., they saw their prize.

"We knew he was wide," said Woods. "His back was humongous. It was like we were following a jon boat."

The hunters managed to hook the beast, but it would not go gentle into that good night. Rather, the beast shredded lines, broke rods, and tested the men's endurance for several hours.

"We held onto him awhile — until 10 or so," Woods told the Ledger. "He broke my rod at that point."

Woods and his crew hooked the beast several more times, but again and again it managed to break off.

"He would go down, sit and then take off. He kept going under logs. He knew what he was doing," Woods recalled. "The crazy thing is he stayed in that same spot."

The more the alligator thrashed, the better sense the hunters got of exactly what they were dealing with.

Thomas told the Post, "It was pandemonium. It was chaos. ... When you have an 800-pound animal on the end of a fishing rod, and he's coming up and he looks like a beast, everybody is kind of going crazy, and your adrenaline is pumping."

"We probably didn't have top-of-the-line equipment because he broke everything we had," said Thomas. "By the end of the night, I didn't think we could catch him because our equipment was shot."

"He dictated everything we did. It was exhausting," Woods told the Ledger. "It was more mentally exhausting than anything because he kept getting off."

Although tested, the crew would not be bested.

Taking on water and working feverishly to close the deal before the oppressive Mississippi heat returned along with the sunshine, the men put their last two good rods to use and slayed the beast around 3:30 a.m..

Thomas told NewsNation, "It was a team effort. Everybody kind of had a job and we fought him hard."

The Post indicated that after noosing the gator in accordance with state law, the hunters rendered the beast the inert stuff of legend with a shotgun blast.

In the 30 minutes it took to get the gator on board, the men began to comprehend the full heft of their prize.

"We just knew we had a big alligator," said Woods. "We were just amazed at how wide his back was and how big the head was. It was surreal, to tell you the truth."

Andrew Arnett, Alligator Program coordinator with the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks, later measured it and discovered the hunters had a state record for "longest male alligator taken by a permitted hunter" on their hands. It weighed in at 802.5 lbs, measured 14 feet and 3 inches long, and sported a belly girth of 66 inches.

Arnett told the Post, "I was actually shocked. ... It's not every year you get something of this magnitude."

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves congratulated the hunters on "harvesting the biggest alligator in state history," adding "#TastesLikeChicken."

NewsNation indicated that the team donated an estimated 380 pounds of the gator's meat to a program in the state that feeds the hungry.

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