One fisherman who had a chance encounter with what was likely a mammoth bull gator and lived to tell the story is 69-year-old Sam Crutchfield. He was wade-fishing when a gator believed to be 11 to 12 feet long attacked him.

Crutchfield is a retired boat captain and guide but still loves to fish. In April 2006, Crutchfield and a friend were in an area where they had caught bream previously.

"My buddy and I got out of the boat and started fly-fishing. I had a rope tied from me to the boat, and as I fished, I pulled the boat along," Crutchfield remembers. "I hadn't even seen a gator. I remember stepping in water that was a little deeper than I usually wade in, about 3 inches over my belt, and then something grabbed me around my right hip like a vise and wouldn't let go.

"I knew instantly it was a gator and started beating him with my fist. He finally let go and I took off for the boat. At first my partner didn't believe me."

Doctors gave Crutchfield antibiotics. Crutchfield said within a day his hip, groin and upper leg turned almost black from bruising. It's standard policy to kill any alligator that attacks a person, but FWC officers and a trapper weren't able to this time. When they went back that night, they counted more than 100 alligators 10 feet in length and longer in the area where Crutchfield was bitten.

It was estimated, based on the width of the bite on Crutchfield's leg, that the gator may have been 11 1/2 to 12 feet in length or longer. A few months after the attack, an alligator hunter participating in the statewide season on Istokpoga killed a huge bull gator in the same area where Crutchfield was attacked. That gator measured 13 feet, 9 inches and weighed 780 pounds.

Just how much pressure a big gator can exact is amazing. In 2003, three researchers -- one each from the University of Florida, Florida State University and another from Arizona, devised an expensive set of bite force bars. They tried the bars on several critters, including a 12-foot alligator at a St. Augustine alligator farm. The bull gator clamped down with an agonizing force of 2,960 pounds. That's considerably more than hyenas (1,000 pounds), lions (940 pounds) and dusky sharks (330 pounds).

If there's one single act that will get a person arrested in Florida in short order, it's the act of feeding a gator. Feeding an alligator causes it to associate people with food and lose all apprehension of approaching people. A number of years ago, there was a much publicized incident in which trappers had baited several hooks in an effort to catch and remove a big hand-fed gator in Sarasota County. Someone kept sabotaging their hooksets, but no one told a young girl visiting the park about the gator. She was killed by an 11-foot, 3-inch alligator when she went swimming. It was the same gator targeted for removal.

Although I wasn't bitten, I had a similar run-in with an alligator that had been fed on Tyndall AFB in eastern Bay County several years ago. A friend and I had walked a well-worn path behind a drone launch complex to a canal to fish. We chose the place because the wind was high and it was the only place I could think of where we could fish and be out of the wind.