A group of Alabama hunters made a record-breaking catch over the weekend after they shot and killed a 1,000 pound alligator.

It took over five hours for the family of hunters to inject hooks into the massive water beast and pull it out of the water in south Alabama, about 80 miles west of Montgomery early Saturday.

Alabama Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries biologists easily measured the gator at 15 feet but found difficulty when it came to weighing the animal.

The first attempt to weigh the gator completely destroyed a winch assembly used by state biologists to weigh average gators. As a result, they were forced to use a backhoe lift it and found that it weighed 1,011.5 pounds.

The gator, which is the largest ever legally killed by a hunter in Alabama, was caught by Mandy and John Stokes, Kevin Jenkins and his teenage children, Savannah, 16, and Parker, 14, reports KTVU.com

"We give all the glory to God. Ten men couldn't have done what we did," John Stokes told AL.com

The gator, however, didn't go down without a fight. Once the family was finally able to attach large hooks into the gator, it took Mandy Stokes several tries to hit the alligator's "sweet spot" behind the eyes and kill it.

The family says they will send the gator to a taxidermy shop, but they have not figured out what to do with it subsequently.

According to AL.com, the previous Alabama record was set by a 14-foot-2, 838-pound gator captured in the Alabama River in 2011 by Keith Fancher from the Alabama River.

"Truthfully, after I saw the Fancher Gator, in my mind I was thinking there's no way we can catch anything bigger than that," Mandy Stokes told AI.com. "When I finally saw it ... the main thing I remembered was the size of its feet. When I saw the size of the foot on this one, I knew it was a good one."