Snakes on a barge

As many of you know, Drew's family has a house on lake Allatoona and we spend almost every weekend in the summer out there. They have this really big boat dock with a maybe 10x10 barge attached that we like to put our lawn chairs on and lay out. I'll post pictures of it if I can find any. Anyway, last year as I was laying on the barge something caught my eye. Right in front of me, in the water was a snake heading to the dock. Since I am quite afraid of snakes, I hightailed it back to the house! Yes, I know it was just in the water and probably not going to get me, but if you're also afraid of snakes, you'd understand! Drew of course did not believe me, "we've never seen any snakes out there" he said. So, I mustered up the courage to back down to get some sun on the barge. Well, this time, as I'm about to lay down on my chair, I see something that resembled an orange rope start to move! As you might imagine, I screamed and jumped onto the dock with Drew. And wouldn't you know, by the time he went to take a look, it was gone. Needless to say, whether he saw it or not, I was not about to get back on that barge. So we sat on the dock and talked for a little while and before going back up to the house Drew decided to take one last look. Sure enough, there was the snake, staring up at him through the boards. "See, I'm not crazy!" I told him. The snake got away that day, but the next week Drew, Clint and Bill went on a little snake hunting trip, armed with their homemade weaponry: a wide paint scraper on a pole, and a divers knife attached by duct tape to a broom handle. Erin and I watched from the porch as they jabbed at the slippery guy. Again, he got away, but not before Clint got a little piece of him! Finally, on the third weekend of trying to kill this snake, Drew got him, cut him into three pieces!

Fast forward to this year, Memorial Day weekend. As we walked down to the lake, we joked about the snake incident from the previous year. "There better not be any snakes waiting for us" Erin joked. Right as Clint puts his chair down Drew says, "hey look, there are two of them laying side by side." Clint got the weapons and they went to work killing them, Drew pinned them with the paint scraper and Clint cut them in pieces with the knife. And then they came back later that afternoon and killed another one while yet a fourth slithered away. Well, guess what, the next weekend, three more! After disposing of those three (though I believe one got away), they decided to pull up the boards to expose the stryrofoam. Well, this weekend, no snakes, though I'm still not getting back on that barge! We think exposing the styrofoam (their hiding place) was what got rid of them, at least for now. I think we are going to just burn the thing and build a new one next year.

So, that is how our weekends at the lake have gone so far this summer. We think it would make for a great sequel to "Snakes on a Plane" as long as Samuel L. Jackson would be on board! Oh, and by the way, they were water moccasins, yikes!