Birchmeier was single-handedly fishing for flounder on May 20 from his four-foot kayak. Images from the local newspaper show that he has caught ‘something’. “I think I’ve got a stingray on the hook,” the fisherman exclaims in the video he was recording at the time.
But out of the swirling, brown water, no ray emerges, but a large alligator. “Surprise,” Birchmeier says in the video as he lets his line celebrate as fast as he can.
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“I was as surprised as I could be when the alligator surfaced,” Birchmeier says of the moment to the local newspaper. “It could even have been a mermaid, and I would have been just as surprised.”
Finally, the alligator straightened out the hook stuck in its hind leg. As a result, the animal was no longer attached to the leash and he could swim away again in the dark water.
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