Surviving an Alligator Attack | Something Bit Me!
Back in a Florida river, an alligator has Fred Langdale dead in its sights and is approaching quickly. So in that moment, I'm thinking, what can I do? What can I do? Some of this stuff I've already thought about ahead of time because I'm in the water all the time. I'm in Florida; you better expect to see a gator at some time in your life. So how am I going to handle this?
When I see him coming, in my mind I know I can't outrun him. I know I can't beat him in a straight-up fight. So my only option is to tire him out and hold him till my friends get here. Alligators have adapted to their environment for millions of years; they're an aquatic predator. As humans, we are terrestrial, so when we go into their habitat, they definitely have the advantage. And as scary as this sounds, when you are head-to-head with an alligator, a crocodile, or another predator, the last thing you want to do is panic or swim or run away. You need to stand your ground; you need to let that alligator or crocodile know, "Oh, you want to come towards me? Well, it's not going to be an easy fight."
When he got probably five yards away, I prayed, I said, "Lord, make me fast and give me agility." When I saw him coming, I'm like, okay, the first move he's going to do is go into the water. So I started taking some long, deep breaths as fast as I could to get as much oxygen in my bloodstream as possible. Alligators and crocodiles can hold their breath anywhere from 90 minutes to 2 hours if it is a large adult. At this point, the alligator is very much at an advantage over Fred.
From the dock, it was hard to tell exactly what he was doing. We could tell he was getting lower in the water and basically just waited. You know, sat there for like five seconds, ten seconds; it seems like a short time until you're sitting there. It's a long time of waiting. When he's probably about three yards away, I got as low in the water as I could and laid my body out flat. So when he would come to me, I wouldn't just be straight in the water; I would be ready to wrap my legs around his tail or his body. That way, I could get a firm grip on him and hold his mouth shut.
When the gator was coming towards me and he's right here, his head's facing towards me, his mouth is closed, and I was trying to guess about his size. So my guess was he might be 6 feet, and that's when my adrenaline kicked in. I reached up underneath his mouth; there's like a flap there, and I grabbed hold. I pushed up, but by me pushing up, he's moving so fast that now by the time I got his head up, it's now here. So I take my right hand and I pull it up on top of his mouth to keep it shut because now I've got the bottom jaw. Now I need to get the top jaw down.
At this point, Fred thinks he's up against a 6-foot alligator. A 6-foot alligator, that's still a lot of muscle that can do a lot of damage. Even a 6-foot alligator that latches onto you and does a death roll is going to tear a limb. By the time I got my left hand up, he's kind of pulling me with him by moving so fast. I wrap my legs around his body to hold on to keep his mouth shut. I'm thinking, I'm a lot bigger than you thought I was, and at the same time, you're way bigger than I thought you were. So my plan to begin with—that's out the window.
Fred finds himself chest-to-chest with an 11-foot alligator. At that length, the gator can easily tip the scales over 400 pounds. I had my arms and my legs wrapped around him. He makes a straight dive towards the bottom, 8 to 10 yards, and then it just went calm. You couldn't see anything; just the water was like glass. Matt and Abraham were still there waiting for Fred to come up or to help Fred. At that point, we were just yelling like, "Y'all guys get out," because, you know, it's a done deal. Basically, we don't know if Fred's coming up or not.
At that point, the calm on the surface of the Kaloa Hatchee River is deceptive. Twenty feet below, Fred Langdale is in a fight for his life. The way I was positioned, his head was right here; so I had a hand right here, and well, I used to have a hand right there. My legs were wrapped around him, so his front claws were kind of digging into my stomach here and there. He points straight down, and his tail starts kicking to go down as far as possible.
When he finally got to his preferred depth, I guess I can feel his body starting to twist, like wiggle, as in he was about to do a death roll. For an alligator, a crocodile, the death roll serves two purposes: it can either help take chunks of a large prey, or it could also be used to injure an opponent. So I squeezed on as tight as I could, and I made it around probably two spins. On the third spin, I felt myself losing grip because he was moving a lot faster than I could hold on. So I pushed off and kicked off of him as hard as I could, like try to kick away in the water to get as much distance between me and his mouth.
We were just kind of stopping, eyeing each other for a second, and then he just takes off. Into the water, as deep as I was, it was just pitch black all around, and there was like a little bit of light up top from the light coming through the water. So I'm trying to get to the surface, and I'm looking around, seeing where the gator is, and all of a sudden, I see him come out of the black and he's coming straight forward. At the last second, I tried to turn to the side and then push with my arm to try to turn myself. I could see his mouth go over my right hand, and I'm trying to pull back, but when I do, I could feel my pinky touch his tongue.
In a gator, that's the wire of the trap. As soon as you touch that, the trap goes off; his mouth shuts down, and he knows something's in there and he just needs to hold it. He snaps down and grabs hold of my arm. He starts to shake back and forth, and then he stops. I'm probably seven yards underwater or something like that, and I could feel the bones start to crack a bit, but I couldn't feel the pain. So that's either God working to help me through that, or it was the adrenaline.
So I started to think, okay, what do I do now? So I slowly started kicking my legs and my left hand to get up to the surface. When I got up to the surface, I took a couple of breaths, and I could feel his weight pull me back down. I prayed and I said, "Lord, I'll see you here in a minute." Everyone was still yelling. Matt and Abraham were still waiting to see if Fred was going to pop up or not.
So once it went calm, there's nothing we could do. Pitch black water, 20 feet deep, 15 feet deep—you're not finding him; there's no helping. The alligator holds Fred under by his arm, drowning the prey. I have accepted that I was probably not going to make it out of the river that day, and I wanted to make sure that my last moments were some of my greatest.
In that moment, I could feel my granddaddy John, my Uncle Johnny, and my friend Kip were on the bank, and I knew they were watching me. They're either about to welcome me home to heaven, or they wanted front row seats to see something awesome happen. Because that's the only two outcomes here that I can see. And in that moment, a voice in my head told me, "Rip your arm off." I'm like, "Well, that's the best option I've got, so might as well go with it."