scratched my eye today

[himiler]

I gotta shut this down, laughing too much and working too little. Thanks for the stories Hu. Adventure is not found behind a desk!

 

[shootingarts]

Yeah, south Louisiana snake stories can run on forever. Haven't even started on stories about the exwife, she was terrified of any kind of snake. She set a race walking record for the 50 yard walk once if there was such a thing. Another time at 5-4 and 105 pounds she bowled over a two hundred twenty pound man and left size seven cowboy boot prints from his feet to his head as she walked over him. Fortunately for him she wasn't wearing spurs that day!

Hu

 

[Toddppm]

Years ago I was commercial crawfishing. Blew my outboard so I made a deal to fish on a farm. Ran three to six hundred traps a day wading in a 50-90 acre pond and dragging a boat behind with the bait and sacking table for the crawfish. Started at first light and when conditions were favorable sometimes I was done by two in the afternoon. One morning I was walking through these weeds sticking up in the water. That's odd, don't remember them being here even yesterday.

As the sun came up a little I saw I was wading through hundreds of 18-20" long cottonmouth moccasins. Keerrrap! Looked ahead, there was a lot more of those weeds sticking up. Looked back, same story. I'm mid-thigh or a bit deeper in the water and Lee jeans not being what they once were I'm pretty sure they aren't snake proof. Just a minute's thought and I went back to pulling traps. It was at least a hundred feet through snakes in any direction to get free of them, couldn't really see how far. Might as well go ahead with what I was doing as anything else. happy to say it worked out for all of us! Hu

Could have been the smell of your shorts so close to the water after seeing them that kept them away!

Hiking at the top of the mountain with my daughter a few years ago we were hopping between large outcrops and boulders, she just about stepped on a big fat timber rattler. Had her foot in the air and saw it just before she put it down, scary for sure.

 

[shootingarts]

Could have been the smell of your shorts so close to the water after seeing them that kept them away!

Hiking at the top of the mountain with my daughter a few years ago we were hopping between large outcrops and boulders, she just about stepped on a big fat timber rattler. Had her foot in the air and saw it just before she put it down, scary for sure.

No idea if possible in the conditions you and your daughter were in but down here we learn to step on logs and such so that the feet are further away from anything chilling in the shade and hidden under a log. We deliberately step wide when stepping up and down. When they are sunning it isn't as bad, at least you can see them.

Believe it or not, after wading with the snakes seven days a week for awhile you develop a certain mellowness around them. A lot like climbing iron, can keep you up nights when you first start climbing to nose bleed levels but after awhile anything begins to seem normal. Still a funny comment though! Never quite created yellow water or brown trout but I came close a couple times. Had a very upset cottonmouth find an entrance flue in my trap and with me over knee deep in the water again he came out at warp speed and exited between my legs! Still had another eight mature cottonmouths in that trap, just knew it was a bunch at the time. Decided I would leave it alone for awhile. I caught between sixty and seventy-five pounds of cottonmouths in that one trap that day.

With the shallow warm water and the abundance of readily available food the ponds were a perfect breeding and growing area for reptiles. I did see a cottonmouth that would have had me calling LSU or the zoo if I would have thought it could be found. Huge snakes were normal in the pond. This snake was so big all the other snakes left the area because they were snack sized and this was a cottonmouth! After months of wading the ponds this one made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I'll just say I'm confident he would have shattered all records for cottonmouths. If he dumped a heavy load of venom in me I was dead, snake bite kit in my pocket or not. Wanted him for a full body mount but I was afraid he was thinking pretty much the same thing about me. Besides, I hate killing huge specimens of almost anything.

Hu