This alligator picked a fight with the wrong senior citizen.
A Florida fisherman survived a terrifying alligator attack after thinking fast — jamming his thumb into the reptile’s eye before striking it in the face again and again with his fishing rod.
James Grayson McMicken, 71, had planned to spend a peaceful evening fishing with his bulldog along the canal behind his North Fort Myers home on July 3. But after just one cast, an alligator suddenly lunged from the water.
“I started reeling, and it jumped out of the water and grabbed me,” McMicken told KGNS News.
The gator clamped down on his right leg and dragged him into the canal, leaving him only moments to fight back.
Luckily for McMicken — and not so luckily for the alligator — he was no stranger to gators. His experience as a gator hunter helped him react quickly enough to break free.
“He rolled me down off the bank into the water. I stuck my thumb in one eye, and I just took that fishing pole and jabbed him in that other eye and jabbed him and jabbed him and jabbed him. It seemed like forever, but it wasn’t that long. But then, he turned loose,” he told the outlet.
“I’ve always heard that if you’ve got no other choice, get them eyes, and that’s what got him off of me.”
With the threat neutralized, McMicken, badly bleeding from deep bite wounds on his right leg, now had to figure out how to make it home.
He called to the bulldog, who stood in place so her owner could use her as leverage to get to his feet before hobbling home.
His wife cleaned his wounds and he collapsed in his chair, exhausted, before his family rushed him to a local hospital, where he received stitches and staples on both sides of his mangled leg.
McMicken’s brush with death made him a bit of a celebrity while he was in the hospital.
“All the nurses on the floor had to come by and go, ‘Wow, you did what?’” he said. “I’m going to do everything I can not to die. No gator is going to run me off.”
Now recovering at home and preparing to start physical therapy, McMicken says the close encounter won’t deter him from his favorite hobby, though he told the outlet he would be keeping his eyes peeled from now on when casting his reel from the shore of the canal.
The close-call follows a pair of recent gator attacks in Florida, including one in which 31-year-old Brittany Clark was fatally mauled by a 12-foot alligator while swimming in the Econlockhatchee River with her boyfriend June 27.
That same day, a Pennsylvania boy lost a hand in a savage alligator attack while on a fishing vacation with his family at Nelson’s Fish Camp in Marion County, Florida.
Alligator attacks are rare in the Sunshine State, despite a population of more than one million of the reptiles, and most bodies of fresh water in the state presumed to contain the creatures.
