Snakes, turtles and squirrels not what anglers hoped to catch

When fishing, anglers commonly see fox squirrels, but few fishermen consider the animals threatening — until one inadvertently gets shaken from its tree and into the boat.
When fishing, anglers commonly see fox squirrels, but few fishermen consider the animals threatening — until one inadvertently gets shaken from its tree and into the boat.

I had just finished a day of fishing with my best friend, Lewis Peeler of Vanndale. Happily, our day had proven very successful. Almost 100 bluegills filled our two stringers, destined for the fish fryers back home.

We decided to clean the fish before leaving the lake and began the task while sitting in the water’s edge beside my boat. It was hot that day, so the cool water felt good on our legs as we filleted the fish. But sitting in the shallows created a hazard we’d never dreamed about.

We were chatting when Lew suddenly screamed. “I’ve been snake bit!” he exclaimed, jumping up and shaking his hand. I was horrified to see blood streaming down his arm.

“Oh, my god!” he said. “A snake struck my finger. What if it was a cottonmouth?”

I examined Lew’s hand, but there was so much blood I could not determine what had caused the bite. The flesh on his finger was shredded and bloody. I wrapped his hand with a clean bandanna, then looked around for the culprit.

“We need to find what caused this,” I said.

That didn’t take long. The 4-foot-long snake hadn’t left. It was right there in the water at our feet, trying to swallow one of the bluegills. “Kill it!” Lew shouted. “Kill it!”

Instead, I squatted down, eyeballed the snake to determine just the right moment to strike, then darted a hand out and grabbed the serpent behind the head. It was an ornery, hungry diamondback water snake, not a venomous cottonmouth. Lew was in no danger of dying, except perhaps from a rapidly beating heart and oversized dose of adrenaline. The experience frightened us both, though, and we’ve never again cleaned fish at the water’s edge. We still wonder what might have happened had it been a cottonmouth instead of a harmless water snake.

Another Arkansas friend, Mitch Milam from Cherry Valley, puts a humorous spin on a snake encounter he had. He’d gone fishing with his uncle Forest one day, and the duo were fishing from a johnboat kept on shore at the pond. Unbeknown to them, a fat cottonmouth had commandeered their craft.

“We had reached the far side of the pond and were attempting to coax some bream from beneath the willows along the bank,” Mitch said. “It was about that time that I happened to look down and found, much to my shock and surprise, a 3-foot-long water moccasin between my feet.

“Now I don’t care if you’re from Arkansas or New York City,” he continued. “Having a water moccasin between your feet is a very bad thing. And I tend to have very diverse and adverse reactions when I encounter a very bad thing. This occasion was no different. I can’t exactly remember what happened next, but somehow I found myself standing amidships on the seat. I figure that either: 1) I teleported there, or 2) I went ninja and performed one of my patented triple-somersault-180-degree-turn maneuvers that I have since become famous for, but no longer do. Either way, I was now standing completely upright on the middle of the boat seat in the middle of the pond. Uncle Forest hadn’t seen the snake and had no idea what the heck was happening.”

At that point, Mitch grabbed a paddle in each hand, and facing the bow, he began paddling the boat as fast as he could toward shore. Of the snake, which shortly thereafter died, Mitch said, “I bet in the next life, he thinks twice before attacking a ninja with a paddle on a boat in the middle of a lake.”

Snakes aren’t the only dangerous creatures anglers encounter, and the anglers themselves may not be innocent bystanders. Sometimes folks bring problems on themselves.

Such was the case with my fishing pal Buddy Pate of North Little Rock, who hooked something huge while fishing on Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee. Turns out it was a massive alligator snapping turtle with powerful, snapping jaws and long claws. Instead of cutting his line and letting the big reptile go its way, Buddy decided to bring the snapper into the small boat.

“It took some doing, but I finally got its long tail in my hand and dragged it into the boat,” he says. “I realized immediately that was a mistake. The turtle’s big hooked jaws were snapping and popping as it extended its long neck and tried to bite me. It took me five long minutes to get that grumpy old turtle back in the water, and by that time, the boat was a wreck, my right hand was bleeding from a bite, and my left hand was bleeding from the reptile’s long, sharp claws.”

Fortunately for Buddy, things didn’t turn out worse.

Scott Rhea of Sherwood shares another hilarious creature encounter he calls “the crazy-ninja-squirrel-attack incident.” He and a friend were bream fishing next to the bank when Scott got his hook hung on a limb hanging over the water. I’ll let him take it from there.

“I began yanking on the line, trying to get it to break, and shook a very well hidden and extremely cranky fox squirrel off his limb and into my boat,” he said. “He hit the bottom between the first two seats with a big thud. I waited a second or two to see if he was OK before I stood and leaned over the second seat to see the little guy.

“About the time our eyes met, he flipped out on me,” Scott continued. “He jumped up on the seat and made a lunge straight for my jugular. I swear. He knocked me backward into my seat (my buddy swears I jumped backward into the seat, screaming like a little girl), and as the bushytail attempted to remove my heart and left nipple with its claws, the squirrel threw the boat off balance and flipped me into the lake. (My friend swears I jumped out on my own, screaming the whole time.) When I came up for air, the squirrel was running down a big log back to shore.”

Could an encounter such as these turn deadly? It’s certainly possible, especially if a big cottonmouth is the culprit. Fortunately, though, such happenstances tend to be more hilarious than serious. Nevertheless, when the wrong creature finds its way into your boat, the experience is likely to be memorable, for sure, especially for fishing companions who witness our foibles.

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