Years ago had a tournament on lake Eufaula, deep in Alabama. Never fished a lake with gators and one of my customers told me they wouldn't bother you if we fished areas he had told us about. We are in backwaters, small openings, lots of grass patches, plenty of places for gators. I can't remember why our boat nestled up to a grass point, maybe we were landing a fish...don't remember...but I do remember the very large gator sitting on that point, not 3 feet from our trolling motor...could have crawled in easily. It really spooked my brother, we backed off and this gator slides into the water and blocks the opening. Now I'm spooked. So we set there for what felt like an eternity, gator floating on top of water and we need to get through. Finally we put the boat in gear and head at this gator. He just sinks out of the way...we never touched him. We also didn't go back in again. We saw several large critters.