Saw quite a few snakes out this week. All were water snakes, thank God.
One evening I saw one swimming across the pond and the bass were hitting it like crazy!! It was almost scarey how hard they were hitting it. It sounded like cement bocks were beig thrown in the water from about 10 ft high! My only thought was they were either trying to kill it(to kill it) or hitting it hard enough to get it out of the water. I doubt they could eat it as it was about 4 ft long but i guess with bass you just never know. It was an amazing sight and sound. I will admit it scared me.
It could also have been the snakes scared some very large carp that are in the pond too and caused the noise.
Sounds like fun. I also saw about a 4 ft. snake swimming across a pond I was fishing on Friday pm. Biggest water snake I’d ever seen. Nothing that I could see even looked at it though…I guess that is a good indicator as to why I didn’t catch anything there. :lol:
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.
Up here (southern Canada) we’ve got six months of winter and, come summer, hordes of mosquitos that seem like they could carry you off to their lairs…but no snakes, other than a few garters…maybe it’s not such a bad tradeoff!. Have to admit, they all give me the willies. I’ll take frostbite to snake bite any day…TIM
Why is it that when a snake falls from a tree into your boat, they are never satisfied with where they landed in the boat and immediately go looking for another place in the boat???!!!
One thing to always keep in mind about water and cotton mouths …
They can (and will) coil right on the surface of the water and strike! Certainly they cannot “reach out and touch someone” as far as they can when coiling and striking on dry land, but they jolly well can on the water’s surface even though it’s maybe half the distance. And … they can do it right quick like, too!
Your correct that the snakes are in fact banded water snakes.
A species that is often confused with the water moccasin. I
have shown this pic to quite a few folks and most think they
are moccasins. Pity for the much maligned banded water
snake. Warm regards, Jim
