re: Alligator Snapping Turtle Restoration

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I'd have had to be REALLY drunk to put that lot of critters in my pirogue. They are amazingly bad varmints.

When I was a kid, my friend's dad worked at this machine shop/drafting company in Destrehan, and it had this really crappy pond right by it. Any of y'all from the area may know this pond. It has a bunch of crap dumped in it, it's pretty much square in shape, some railroad tracks ran by it, and there's nothing in it but trash fish/gar, turtles, snakes, etc.

Anyway, we'd go to work with my buddy's dad sometimes to fish (and look at Playboys and Penthouses in the crew trailer next door to his dad's shop office). We were like maybe 10/11 years old.

So, we're fishing in that pond one day, and an elderly black gentlemen was fishing there too. He had no pole, rod and real, or anything like that. Just trot line string, big hooks, with the biggest salt water corks I'd ever seen, baited with either some chicken parts or cut bait or something. He'd throw his line out, and tie it off to a stick he'd poked into the ground. Much like Curtis Lowe, he'd then proceed to drink wine. That was his job. Wine drinker, and fisherman.

Every time his cork moved, we were like "get him man". He'd just say "aaaaaahhh, boys, dats lil ones".

Finally, his cork disappeared for about 30 seconds. And thus began an epic struggle. An old black guy vs. what to date is the largest alligator snapping "tunnel" (as he referred to the beast) that I've ever seen. It lasted 30 minutes, and ultimately, the trashy pond delivered the nasty beast, and the beast was none too happy. I didn't realize that removing the beast from the pond was only the beginning of the battle.

Eventually, the snuff snorting, wine drinking black man (I think it was snuff) won the day. He was able to get a stick, or screwdriver, or something positioned inside the beast's shell, such that the beast's neck was exposed. And it was a surprisingly LONG neck. We were as amazed by this battle as we were by the beautiful blond bush of Miss November, 1976. In those days, snapping turtles were as big as Volkswagons, and women's vaginal areas were surrounded by hair. We considered blond hair the rarest and most desirable.

He celebrated his victory by decapitating the "tunnel" with a cane knife. Throwing his headless trophy over his shoulder, and carrying it by its tail, he limped down the tracks, with his combo iceless ice chest/tackle box - a 5 gallon paint bucket in tow.

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