Dennis Dunn's Oregon Elk

My wife, Karen, came down with the flu the night we arrived in Florida on December 4th, and she proceeded to spend the rest of the 10-day vacation pretty much in bed. I felt especially sorry for her, because she had planned the trip so that she could shoot an alligator and a wild boar. The whole thing had been her idea from the start.

I did manage, nonetheless, to get in one exciting day of hunting, myself, near Lake Okeechobee, and I lucked out in harvesting two trophy critters with my Steve Gorr recurve bow and a Suzanne St. Charles wooden arrow.

On the morning of December 6th, I made a running, 30-yard shot on a 208-pound wild boar, and that same night — hunting by boat with headlamps — I managed to put a fish-arrow into a BIG alligator. The latter was an honest eleven-footer, and in the picture below his tail is touching the ground. The line was 400# dacron, and, after he towed our boat around the lake for the better part of an hour, we finally dragged him ashore by the tail, where I finished him off with a Howard Hill broadhead to the brain and a Zephyr-Sasquatch head to the spinal cord. The measured length of the prehistoric brute came in at eleven feet, one inch. The outfitter was Lee Lightsey of Outwest Farms (.com).

Merry Christmas and Happy New Years to all,

— Dennis

Dennis Dunn - Florida Hunt