alligator
The 723.5-pound alligator captured by Beth Trammell and her crew Hattiesburg American

Alligator hunting season in Mississippi got off to a wild start over Labor Day weekend, after the state record for the heaviest alligator ever captured was broken in two separate incidents.

According to Hattiesburg American, first-time hunter Beth Trammell of Madison and her six-person crew spent two hours trying to capture an alligator, finally succeeding in getting the animal into their boat after help from other hunters. When the crew finally saw the alligator in full, Trammell said, “Oh my gosh. It’s the Loch Ness monster.”

When the alligator was weighed, it came in at 723.5 pounds, shattering the previous state record by 26 pounds.

MSNewsnow.com reports that the incident took place at Issaquenna County in the Yazoo Diversion Canal north of Redwood, Miss.

Just one hour later, Dustin Bockman of Vicksburg and his crew were busy trying to capture an alligator on the Mississippi River near Port Gibson.

“We’d shine the light on him, and he’d go under,” Bockman told Hattiesburg American. “We’d turn the lights off and wait, and he’d be 100 yards upriver and we’d do it again.”

Finally, an exhausted Bockman and his crew were able to shoot the alligator with a crossbow.

"He broke all the lines we could put in him,” Bockman said, according to MSNewsnow.com. “Finally [we] put a snare on him and got him up high enough and put a shot on him. All in all probably took us four and a half hours to catch him from the first time we saw him."

Getting the alligator into the boat wasn’t easy. Bockman and his crew headed for a sandbar and waited two and a half hours for help. “We pulled his head up on the bank far enough he wouldn’t float away,” Bockman told Hattiesburg American. “He was so heavy he wasn’t going anywhere.”

It was eventually determined that Bockman’s 13-foot, 4.5-inch alligator weighed a whopping 727 pounds, breaking the record from an hour before.