Mr. No Shoulders slows boat work

I once worked for a major Southern newspaper that had a firm policy:  No snake news. No snake pictures. As a young reporter, I was told "our readers don't want snakes with their morning papers." So, if you are of that persuasion, don't read any farther.

It is a fact that if you live near water in the Southern states, snake encounters are almost everyday occurrences. I think snakes are frightening on some visceral level, but my policy is non-confrontational. I am wary, and when I encounter long reptiles, I usually just wait for them to go away. That's why I got almost no boat work done this week.

The creature that stopped action this time was a green water snake. He's non-venomous, but known to bite and leave victims with wound-site bacterial infections. I had taken the cover off our ski boat to begin spring cleaning. It seemed like only minutes later, that I saw about three feet of snake disappear under the piled up canvas boat cover.

Wikipedia

The green water snake shown at right, from Mississippi, is actually rather small as green water snakes go. There is a Florida variety of  green water snake that herpetologists  believe to be the largest native snake in North America, some getting to be 6 feet long.

The late Belle, who was our 13-pound Silky Terrier, once cornered a specimen  in our garage that turned out to stretch to 5 feet, 5 1/2 inches, nose to tail tip.
I had to shoot that one, because it wouldn't go away. (The snake, not the dog).

Anyway, this week, I chose to ignore the creature under the canvas. I did some more boat cleaning, then left the dock. Then I started worrying about whether he might have friends. I began to envision my boat dock and that  pile of canvas as a possibly attractive unwanted snake habitat.

Something had to be done. I thought about it all week, then made an approach early one cool morning, with an oar at the ready.

Right away, I noticed something in a pile of rope that didn't look like a rope.

Click this photo to enlarge it, and you'll see a snake skin winding through the lines toward the canvas in the upper left part of the picture.




Emboldened by the idea that freshly de-skinned snake wouldn't hang around the dock, I flipped the canvas, and found only this:

I tried to stretch the skin out without breaking it up. (The gloves are in the picture for a sense of scale).

A measurement showed this guy was about five feet long when he discarded his scaly suit.

I assume he became longer and fatter, and therefore needed to shed. He's probably still around here someplace, still growing toward a record dimension.




Lesson learned:  Don't leave piles of canvas and other such reptile-attracting stuff laying around the docks.