An 8-foot alligator took this photo with its mouth in Bluffton. How it happened
When an 8-foot alligator snatches your phone, you don’t expect to ever get it back.
But Michael Wilkins, 22, and Clay Porlina, 23, defied the odds when they were fishing at Rose Hill Plantation in Bluffton in May and lost an iPhone to a hungry alligator.
When they recovered the phone, the friends of 15 years discovered that not only did it still work, but it contained new photos.
When the alligator bit down on the phone, it unknowingly took a burst of photos of Wilkins standing on the bank. The photos are framed by menacing teeth.
No humans or alligators were harmed in the photo shoot and surrounding events. But when Wilkins recounted the harrowing ordeal to his grandmother, Alice Wilkins of Sun City, over Thanksgiving, she couldn’t get the image of an alligator chomping on a phone out of her head.
“Apple iPhone is so easy to use, even an alligator can use it!!!” she wrote to The Island Packet.
How on Earth did this happen?
Wilkins, a college student at Georgia Southern University, was home fishing with his buddy Porlina on May 9 near the golf course in Rose Hill — where the two frequently fish together for largemouth bass.
“On his first cast he caught a fish, and a gator started swimming toward us,” Wilkins said of Porlina, who he said is a “much better fisher” than he is.
The gator, which Wilkins caught on video, followed the fish to shore and came up the pond’s bank as Porlina was taking the fish off the hook.
The two young men took off in the other direction, leaving their fishing poles, tackle box and Porlina’s iPhone 8 on the ground.
The alligator took the iPhone and went back into the water with it.
“There was nothing we could really do about it then,” Wilkins said.
Except there was.
Instead of eating the phone, the gator “chomped” on it before dropping it into the water. The friends remembered that Porlina’s phone is water-resistant, so they devised a plan that made the Wilkins family gasp when he retold the story at Thanksgiving.
They decided that Porlina would cast another line far away and try to distract the alligator with a fish while Wilkins rolled up his shorts, got into the pond, and tried to find the phone by shuffling his feet along the bottom.
DISCLAIMER: S.C. Department of Natural Resources spokesperson David Lucas says to never approach an alligator or its habitat, which is just about any body of freshwater in the Lowcountry.
Wilkins got lucky, and while the gator was distracted, he waded through waist-deep water and found the phone.
“The only reason I got in the water was because I knew he was better at fishing and he could catch a fish first,” he said. “Then I saw the screen light up, and it was safe.”
The fishermen packed up and moved to another fishing pond before Porlina opened his photos to find the alligator had captured several shots of Wilkins on the bank of the pond.
His theory is that when the alligator was chomping on the phone, it took photos using the side buttons that typically are used to control volume.
While Wilkins admits their scheme was not the safest, he said he’s lucky to have the photos because “no one would have ever believed us.”
The pair told security at Rose Hill about the alligator.
“Obviously it’s not scared of anybody, it tried eating one of our phones,” he said. “We didn’t want it exterminated or anything, but that gator was being fed.”
Months later, Porlina is still using the iPhone that was almost gator lunch.
This story was originally published December 5, 2019 at 4:30 AM.
