Alabama is the home of a lot of different fish species, but there aren’t many freshwater fish that get bigger than the alligator gar. On Thanksgiving, Fruitdale fisherman Keith Dees and his son, Huntley, caught an Alabama gar that set a new state record. The seven-foot-long alligator gar weighed in at a state record 162 pounds.
Dees is a veteran fisherman who has spent his life on the water. Dees was fishing for bass in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta on Thanksgiving Day with his son – as is their tradition – when the big fish struck his bait.
“My first thought was I had hooked another big redfish,” he said. “I was cranking as fast as I could to try to get the line tight. The water is salty and cold that time of year, so the clarity was not great. I see a fish go by the front of the boat, a glimpse of a fish. I told my son, ‘I’ve got one of those big redfish.’ We caught one that weighed 32 pounds up there a few years ago. Then it went about 30 or 40 yards out and just kind of stopped. It wasn’t like a redfish run.”
Dees had thought that it was a redfish and then possibly a black drum. He and his son were fighting the fish for a half an hour before they realized that they had hooked a big alligator gar. Dees hooked the big fish with a medium-sized rod and real with a 15-pound line, so he realized that was going to be difficult to actually bring in.
“After about two hours, it got to where we could pull the boat up by the fish, and it would just swim along,” Dees said. Dees and his son eventually lassoed the fish with the tow rope to get the massive fish in the boat. “I figured that was our only chance to get him.”
The Dees had to put the big fish in an old pool in order for it to be inspected as a possible state record.
Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries biologist Tommy Purcell did the required inspection to verify that it was an alligator gar. The fish had to be weighed on certified scales, so Dees put tarps and $200 worth of ice in the back of his truck to drive the fish to Orange Beach Marina to be weighed.
“The Delta is a very, very special place to me,” Dees told Alabama Outdoors, David Rainer. “Catching that fish doesn’t happen if I hadn’t spent my whole life on the water. I was known as a river rat by all my bass fishing buddies that I traveled to tournaments with, and they said there was nothing more appropriate for me than to have a state record with a gar.”
The carnivorous alligator gar (Atractosteus spatula) is one of the largest freshwater fish in North America. Gars have the ability to breathe air as well as the ability to pull air out of the water with their gills. The alligator gar is the largest of the gar species.
As big as the Dees fish is, alligator gars can get even bigger. The largest alligator gar on record was caught by Kenny Williams on Lake Chotard in Mississippi. That Mississippi fish was almost eight and a half feet in length and weighed 327 lbs. The previous record had been taken in Texas in 1951 and weighed 279 pounds. Fossil gars have been found dating back 100 million years ago to the dinosaurs in the early Cretaceous Period. Alligator gars are slow-moving predatorial fish that is an ambush predator preying on fish, young waterfowl, and small mammals.
Alabama anglers are limited to taking just one alligator gar per day. The Dees fish was certified as the new state record last week.
Alabama is a sportsman’s paradise with year-round freshwater fishing, hunting, and saltwater fishing opportunities.
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