Longview

Justin Broomhall took a Sunday fishing trip to Lake Cherokee with his father and his son. Little did he know they would make the catch of a lifetime. The Longview, Texas resident hooked a massive alligator snapping turtle on Father's Day, the biggest he's ever seen. "My dad was like 'Holy smokes, look at the size of that!'" Broomhall said. "My three-year-old son started panicking. He thought it was a dinosaur and kept saying, 'Let it go. Let it go. Put it back!'" Broomhall was using dough bait in hopes of reeling in a catfish, he said. However, "from [the turtle] being so old and going blind, he's using his smell to find bait," he said. "I guess he felt it, thinking it was some other dead fish and he ate it." The enormous creature weighed in around 200 lbs and was likely between 100 to 150 years old, estimated Broomhall, who works at Whitaker Plumbing in Carthage, Texas. "I do a lot of lifting. I was a bodybuilder in high school and 200 lbs to me is pretty easy to pick up," he … [Read more...] about Texas man catches massive alligator snapping turtle, then releases it back into the wild