Wow, I've never seen that happen in 50 years paddling in the AmSouth. Gators usually swim away from a canoe or kayak in fear. Maybe the gator was reflexively swimming toward a safe, deep hole that was right in the path of the kayak.
I've told this story before, but a gator sank my 22' outrigger canoe on the Guana River in Florida. I was paddling along and something bumped under my stern hull about six feet behind my seat and I thought I heard a thrashing sound. I thought I might have gone over a log, but I was puzzled because I usually hit logs on the deepest part of that highly rockered hull, which is right under my central seat. I paddled on.
About 15 minutes later, paddling was becoming very difficult as if I were paddling in mud. I then realized that my entire stern hull was filled with water and sinking. No way I could paddle back to the put-in. Fortunately, there was a small (4' x 4') duck blind dock in the middle of the water not too far away. I reached it and tried to dump hundreds of pounds of water out of the stern hull through a small hatch, but I couldn't do it by reaching down from the safety of the small dock. I had to stand in the chest deep water and lift the stern from underneath . . . all the while knowing there were many gators swimming around under the waters!!! Scared, very.
The stern hatch is under the blue ditch bag in this photo:
I finally got most of the water out of the stern hull and tried to patch the damage with duct tape. It was a line of about ten perforations in the hull, which I concluded was caused by the teeth or bumpy body or tail of a gator. However, the duct tape would not stick to the wet hull. Not at all. Useless. And I had no way of drying the hull. I decided to race to the put-in while my stern again slowly filled with water through the perforation holes. I just made it.
Lesson: Test your duct tape on a wet hull to see if it will actually stick. What I did was to buy some epoxy putty, which I've since carried in my day bag.
