Angelo Tager couldn’t help but show off photos of a prize 13-foot alligator.

Alligators of that length have been weighed at up to 700 pounds.

Tager said that he and his wife Crystal Nunn Tager and their son Hunter were on the lake hunting Saturday night and into Sunday morning.

At about 12:45 Sunday morning, they sunk their hook into the 13-foot beast.

“It took us about an hour just to get it up to the boat,” Tager said.

“Once it was alongside our pontoon, my wife Crystal was able to get a shot at it with a .357 Magnum bang stick.”

Tager said the family struggled for hours to get the beast into their 20-foot pontoon boat.

“We had to wave down some fellow gator hunters to help get it on the boat,” he said.

Tager said the alligator is being processed at Peach Orchard Processing in Sumter.

“We are having this once in a lifetime gator mounted for all of us to remember the exciting time we had that night,” he said.

Paul Kirby is editor and publisher of The Lexington Ledger and a former Chronicle correspondent.