Tropical storm Fay hits Cuba at 5 a.m. Sunday. By the end of the week, the storm will have circled Florida three times, leaving torrential downpours and flooding in its wake. But tonight the waters of Lake Kissimmee are calm. Under the illumination of a full moon, the sky holds a limitless display of stars that are reflected in the open waters. The horizon is a solid portion of the heavens, broken only by a jagged coastline of oak trees, Spanish moss thick in their branches.

Despite the tranquility of the lake, these not the best conditions to be hunting alligator.

Far from the trappings of gridlock and urban sprawl, I’ve come to central Florida, 75 miles south of Orlando, to follow Cobb resident David Grisham and Bruce Humphries, a Marietta native, on their first hunt of Alligator missis-sippiensis, or the American alligator.

We go hunting in two boats – one to guide and one to hunt. I am sitting in the guide airboat south of Brahma Is-land as other craft buzz in the distance, harkening in the opening weekend of alligator season in Florida. Their run-ning lights aren’t hard to spot, the moon has given a full view across the entire lake.

A few hundred yards away, our hunting boat, piloted by hunting guide Phil Walters, is zooming along looking for a gator in the realm of 10-feet long. The light of the moon has kept the gators scarce. Walters’ headlamp can be seen scanning the surface of the water, probing for the red eyes of our prey skimming along the top.

“It’s a different challenge,” Grisham said, owner of both East Cobb and Bridge Mill Auto Care. “It’s not like any other thing you could ever go do.

“I have (hunted) a lot of places. Whitetail deer in Canada, elk in Canada, mountain lion in Montana. I like to go to see new places that otherwise I would never get to go see.”

To make a successful kill, Grisham will have to harpoon a gator from close range and then pull him in on guide-lines into the boat. The trick is, he has to let the lines back out periodically to wear the gator done before pulling him back in again, because you don’t want a full strength 1,000-pound reptile in an air boat with you. Only once he is in the boat and incapacitated can they make the kill. No easy task.

“It’s primal that you don’t shoot these things,” Walters said. “There is no comfort zone. It’s me to you with an al-ligator and he could be 12 or 13 feet bigger than my boat, weigh more than all of us combined and he is (angry). We’ve got to deal with him and we don’t have a gun.”

Humphries agrees the experience is an adrenaline rush, even somewhat surreal.

“When a lot of this stuff happens at close range, it’s very interesting,” Humphries said. “It’s real different. Going 30 mph in the black night over lily pads, it’s like taking your first breath under water with Scuba gear. It’s just really removed from your normal life.”

The leader of the hunt is Dr. Steve Deibler. A veterinarian from Dacula, Deibler also has a business setting up hunts to the far reaches of the North America. Through his Web site, deibleroutdoors.com, he promotes hunting and fishing expeditions — providing the guides he has met over the years — and a television program that chronicles the excursions.

Alligator hunting is back on the rise in terms of popularity. After years of poaching decimated populations across the Southeast, alligator hunting was prohibited in the 1960s and the alligator placed on the endangered species list in 1967. Conservation helped populations boom in the next 40 years and state regulated hunts followed. Georgia opened its hunt in 2003 and South Carolina began its hunt this year. States like Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas and Florida also have regulated hunts.

“It’s exotic,” Deibler said. “It’s not something you can do every day. They are out there running around on air-boats at night. Most people have never been on an airboat unless they are from southern Florida. Alligators are con-sidered kind of scary, prehistoric, that has an allure to it. It’s almost all adventure.”

Deibler is right.

There is an adrenaline rush to hunting an animal that would as just as soon eat you given the chance. With jaws that can put up to 3,000 pounds per-square-inch in a bite and considering the weapon of choice is a harpoon thrown from an air boat, the playing field levels just a bit.

With the only opportunity for each to get a gator coming Friday and Saturday night, neither Grisham or Humphries has a Captain Ahab-like blood lust for the hunt, but they will have his weapon of choice. We are hunting with harpoons, the darts made by Walters himself, that are attached to lines with buoys so that when you harpoon an alligator, reeling him in is kind of like a cross between boating a marlin and a scene from “Jaws.”

It’s an eight-hour trek to Lake Kissimmee from Smyrna, just over 500 miles, and when you cross Lake Wales, Grape Hammock Fish Camp is another 15 miles.

A mile off the highway lies the fish camp, which will be my home for two days and nights. The plan is to hunt in the night and sleep during the day.

At the camp, a buzz of activity is underway as trucks towing boats cycle through the black-grey soil of the dirt roads. Trailers and cabins are littered throughout the camp, surrounded by massive pick-ups that tow boats.

I meet Deibler at his cabin while wandering to mine. He has rented a cabin that sleeps eight to house he, Grisham, Humphries and our guides for the hunt. The intent of the weekend is made obvious by a crossbow that sits on the kitchen table.

After introductions, I find my cabin, a rustic-looking place that hides a kitchen and cable TV inside.

An hour after I check in at my home for the weekend Phil Walters arrives with his air boat. Walters, who owns the charter business Gator Guides, is a former salesman for Southern Wine who decided to try his hand at making his hobby a career.

“You can take the Southern boy out of the woods, but you can’t take the woods out of a Southern boy,” he said. “We hunt these things to protect our children and our poodles.”

Before heading out, we split our teams up onto two boats. I ride in the chase boat.

We set out at dusk.

An airboat is essentially a fishing boat with an airplane engine attached to the back. The purpose is to maintain speed without putting a prop in the water. This allows the airboats the ability to cut through high marsh grass and even navigate on land, a must in central Florida.

As night settles in, we cut across undulating carpets of lily pads and Kissimmee grass. A persistent cloud of in-sects stings and pelts my face like I was a windshield on I-95.

“You can get it up to 50 or 60 [miles per hour],” Walters said. “You have got to watch your speed because these things can go airborne. Dry ground you can get up to 25.”

We hang back from the hunt boat to give them room to scout. The goal is to get two gators – one Friday night and one Saturday.

In the darkness, Walters uses his headlamp to scan the surface for gators. Occasionally, a set of red eyes lights up like two solitary bulbs on a string of Christmas lights, but by the time we approach they have sunk away.

The full moon has not been our friend, as there were only a few prospects and fewer attempts at a shot. The in-sects are still plentiful though.

“I think I swallowed a bug,” Grisham jokes, “but he went in through my nose hole.”

We cruise in the chase boat until 1:30 a.m. without a catch, but head back to the camp when we begin running low on fule. Grisham, Deibler and Walters stay out until 5:30 a.m. but come back empty handed.

Four hours of hunting with nothing to show for it, but bug bites and a headache from the airboat’s roaring motor.

Saturday comes easy and though there is little to do before dusk, there seems to be an unspoken sense of urgency in the air. Tonight we have to bring in not one, but two gators, to make the trip worthwhile.

We set out after recording some passes and letting Humphries get a few practice throws in with the harpoon. We separate at nightfall, and as the moon is still full, the visibility is optimum.

Our guide puts at a stop for a moment among the lily pads. With four people on board, plus equipment, we burn fuel quicker than the hunt boat. We can see across the whole lake. Tonight there are fewer boats than there are ga-tors.

After a moment of bobbing in the waves to cool the engines, we start off again, this time, skimming overland.

Cutting across the island, we glimpse wild hogs, deer and infant gators who scurry, hardly troubled by our pres-ence. Though the sound of the prop has me continually looking to see if a helicopter is about to land on us, the deer let us get within maybe 20 yards before trotting off into the night. As we emerge from the island, we see Humphries throw a harpoon from the bow of his boat. He has his first kill.

It’s 11:15 p.m.

Our boat slices through the water quickly as Walters and Humphries slowly tug at the harpoon lines. They have hit something big, at least a 10-footer.

“He was beginning to turn, so he gave us a good target,” Walters said.

As they reel in the line, I snap photos. Each time the gator comes near the surface, he turns his head near the boat and snaps his powerful jaws.

The pair let out some line, which is buoyed to wear the gator out and then begin pulling again. Every time they pull him in, the gator wildly thrashes in the water.

The bite sounds almost muted and benign, like a heavy book falling shut, but a glimpse of the teeth, up to 80 for some adults, shows the damage these animals can do. This gator has a large in his lower jaw, presumably from fighting with a larger rival during mating season earlier in the summer. Looking like a flap of teeth and flesh dan-gling loose his mouth, it impairs his grip eact time he tries to bite at the boat.

Walters instructs to let him loose, hoping the weight of the line will continue to tire our catch.

Humphries and Walters both threw a harpoon upon first sighting their prey. Uncannily, they hit the same spot, akin to Robin Hood splitting his arrow. While bringing the gator up, the have put a third into his neck and let the weight of the line and its buoys tire him. They then begin to methodically pull the line.

After two or three snaps, they manage to tire the gator enough to bind his mouth.

While an alligator’s jaws are incredibly powerful when biting, they are comparatively weak to open and a couple of strips of meager duct tape are all that is needed to bind them. Once bound, they pull him into the boat and Humphries severs his spinal cord with a six-inch knife.

We have our first gator.

At 10-feet-4-inches, it’s an impressive catch, and Humphries is enamored with the experience.

“I was getting a little nervous there, we were kind of late in the game,” he said. “I had lowered my standards a bit, to maybe below eight feet would have been fine. He was moving, so I was aiming for the water where I thought he would go, I guess I got lucky.

“I have done a lot of big game fishing, so it was ok (towing him in), but once that big head came out of the water, it was kind of scary. It made it a little unnerving when he said, ‘Reach down and grab the leg,’ and the head was even with my face. That was kind of nerve-racking but fun.”

On the shore, it takes at least six of us to carry our catch to Grape Hammock’s cooler, where the floor is covered en masse with 10-foot alligators. The skin feels like a thick, slick leather almost rubbery under the every weight. On the shore, the powerful tail still swings as part of nerve ending reacting though the gator has long since been dead.

Grisham is now eager to get his mark, so after seven of us stuff our catch into the cooler and head out again.

However, this time the gators are more scarce. After cruising the coast of Brahma Island, we find nothing. At 4 a.m. my boat docks and I head off to bed.

I awake the next morning, to find out that Grisham bagged a seven-footer less than an hour after my head hit the pillow.

“It was an adrenaline rush,” he said. “He got up on some lily pads and gave me one of the few good shots I had of the night. I put it where I was supposed to, the harpoon did its job and it wasn’t a big long fight because it was a smaller gator, but I got to experience what I came for.”

With a potential hurricane on my tail and the RPMs of an airboat prop still ringing in my head, I make the long drive back home. After two nights in an airboat, I want to be in my own bed, but the chance to hunt a noble predator leaves its own rewards. To confess, I would go again to wander among the murky waters and the tall grass if given the chance.

“Huntsman rest! thy chase is done;” – Sir Walter Scott