Fortunately, I don't see too many snakes in this neck of the woods. I see the occasional water snake on the local creek. The one I saw last year was about 3 feet long. The only incidents I've had with snakes happen in Tennessee. Once while hiking in East Tennessee I was admiring a view and looked down to see a copperhead crawling across my boot. Instinct made me kick and the snake went flying in one direction and I took off in the other. The other two occurred in West Tennessee and involved cottonmouths. My parents had come to visit me, and I dragged my dad out to a local pond to fish. He was using a frog colored Jitterbug and a small cottonmouth became fascinated with it. Everytime my dad would cast to a certain area of the pond, the snake would come and check it out. After doing this a few times, it decided the Jitterbug was lunch and swam after it making a couple of strikes at it. It followed the lure right to the bank where we were standing, and I politely whacked it on the head with my rod tip to discourage it. It left us alone the rest of the afternoon.
The second one, I was an amused bystander. Four of us had gone to Reelfoot Lake to do some crappie fishing. We rented a couple of boats. I'm not sure if its changed or not but back then the rental boats had a round bottom because of all the sunken timber in the lake, and they weren't the most stable fishing platform. My buddy and I were fishing some cypress knees, and our friends were about 100 feet away under another cypress tree. We heard this yell and looked over to see one guy climbing onto the back seat and the other one climbing onto the front seat. The guy in the rear was trying to balance the boat while the one in the front was using a oar to poke at something in the bottom of the boat. After a minute or so, we saw a fairly large snake coming flying out of the boat with the aid of the oar. We motored over to them, and found that a large cottonmouth had drop out of the tree into the boat. The rest of the day those two wouldn't go near any cypress trees.