There are fellas here in Baldwin County, AL who snatch these darned things out of the bay bare handed. Not the big ones mind you, just the little three - four footers.
I was once with friends doing that on a night outing in a Florida swamp in the early 1980s. My friends were biologists trying to get an idea of the numbers and health of the local gator population. They were astonished at the rapidity of the gator’s recovery from near extinction a decade earlier.