NAPLES, Fla. — It looks like tourists aren’t the only ones enjoying the water in Florida.

Even though temperatures have dipped in the Sunshine State, that did not prevent a nearly 8-foot long alligator from taking a late-night dip in a pool.

“This is crazy. And nobody believed. And we saw, like, the video, especially when he was rolling, and it was the big boy,” said Rob Emhoff, a neighbor of the Naples residence where the alligator commandeered the pool. “My wife got up with this little one to take her to the bathroom, probably around 1 a.m., and all of a sudden she came back in, and she’s like, ‘Hey, I just heard something splash in the pool.’”

Emhoff originally thought the noise was from a pool filter, but he quickly realized the pool had a scaly visitor.

“Next, you know, we saw, like, the huge shadow become, you know, this crazy striped alligator,” he told WINK-TV.

The alligator was spotted lounging by a basketball hoop in the deep end of the pool.

In an ironic twist, the defending NCAA men’s basketball champions are the Florida Gators.

“He was down over there at the deep end. And then he moved over. He’s right by the basketball hoop,” Emhoff said. “There he was just kind of hanging out. He kept going to the bottom. Then he was popping his head up.”

Officials and Emhoff believe the alligator entered the pool through a broken fence.

The Emhoffs called the non-emergency line for Collier County and authorities arrived in about 10 minutes.

It took an additional 10 minutes for wildlife officials to harness the gator, who stood his ground in the paint, so to speak.

The alligator was finally subdued and its mouth was taped. The reptile was then loaded into a trailer already occupied by two other trapped alligators.

“He really wasn’t happy because there were another two gators in there, and they just didn’t play very nice,” Emhoff told WINK.

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