I wanna know..

[Jay]

Back in the early 80's our sub was one of the first in King's Bay GA. We had a bad habit of cooling the reactor with a fire hose in port when shut down. One would have to climb on the pressure hull inside the outer skin to adjust the ball valve. The outer hull is a free flood area covered in very black paint .. and other stuff. Nice and toasty on an otherwise cool day in Georgia. We learned pretty quickly to bang the crap out of the hull with a very large metallic object prior to going in there. They were not always cotton mouths, but enough were.

But no, never bitten and never knew anyone who was til I read this thread.

[wingman]

Man oh man the memories. Not a single person has known what a trotline is since I moved out of Louisiana. We grew up trotlining gar and smacking em in the head with a paddle to get them in the pirogue. If I even bring it up to anyone in Florida they ask if I'm cajun or if I know anybody from that swamp show.

I went to high school in southern AR and regularly ran trotlines for mud cat and yo yos for channel cat on the Ouachita River and its wetlands. Great fun and good eating.

[Art Greenberg]

Let's put this to a rest.

You're kidding, right? Don't you realize this is the Internet?

[Jont]

Hi:

I was bitten by a copperhead as a child and had an encounter with a WM at Madison....still have scars on my knee from the copperhead.....the WM is a distant cousin of the copperhead, WM's venom is more toxic then the copperhead and is a hemotoxin, that's why swelling and tissue damage is the norm. WM bites are early fatal but do require immediate medical attention, if a bit goes ignored the odds of loosing a limb grow ten fold.

Young WM can easily be mistaken for Water Snakes, the best way to tell is the eyes, if the eyes are slits like a cat then you know it's a pit viper..so stay away.

WM's aren't really aggressive towards humans but during mating season (mid may thru mid June) they should be avoided because they become very unpredictable during this time, what makes people think they are aggressive is because they are in fact "lazy snakes" that means they don't move out of the way as quickly as the hundreds of other snakes that avoid human contact at any cost, so when we come across one we react and so does the snake.

WM's are most comfortable on river banks and swamps near warm water 80 degrees or so and generally avoid the cooler springs that are 72 degrees but they do like intersections where warn water meets cool spring water. They are incredibly adaptive and have been found in forests hundreds of miles from warm water.

If WM's went after people I think many divers would have been bit, but as with all snakes it's better to shoot first and ask questions later.

The WM at Telford has been handled.

[gasdiver]

Man oh man the memories. Not a single person has known what a trot-line is since I moved out of Louisiana. We grew up trotlining gar and smacking em in the head with a paddle to get them in the pirogue. If I even bring it up to anyone in Florida they ask if I'm cajun or if I know anybody from that swamp show.

When I lived in Thibodaux LA, I never ran a trot-line, but we went frog gigging quite a bit. It was very common to see snakes in tree branches that hung down into the water. We were always very careful when approaching a frog that was under tree limbs for this reason. If a snake had fallen in the boat, we were likely to knock the beer cooler into the bayou trying to get it out and that would have been a major disaster.

These trips ended when we got busted by the Game and Fish for having guns in the boat. None of us knew it was illegal. It cost us $75 each to pay the fine. We quit frog gigging because I was not going out into that swamp in the middle of the night without weapons! Yeah, there were lots of gators out there, but that's not who we were worried about.

Growing up on a farm in middle GA, we set trot-lines in ponds, lakes and rivers all the time. It got real interesting when you caught a 50 lb snapping turtle.

[curtschu]

You're kidding, right? Don't you realize this is the Internet?

This thread will be revived 4 or 5 years from now when some new cave diver fines it and has a comment to make about getting chased.

[a64pilot]

I used to do a lot of frog gigging and have run a trot line or two for catfish, when frog gigging, it was common to shine your light behind the canoe and see a couple of snakes in the wake, I have no idea why they would follow us, perhaps because we were scaring many frogs into the water?

[Benderr]

Moccasins are probably THE MOST miss identified snake in the US. Everybody wants to think they saw a Moccasin. I worked at two (and lived at another) Florida State Parks so I've heard it all before. That entire time I saw ONE positivley identified Moccasin and dozens if not a hundred that were miss identified.

Same thing happens with sharks. Every time someone sees a shark that isn't a hammerhead, it's automatically a bull shark. I've probably seen over a hundred sharks, and maybe five were bulls.