Sundown Sailing Adventures

Snakes - a danger of boating?

If you haven’t read our blogs from the beginning, then you probably don’t know our beautiful, new-to-us 1982 Hans Christian 33t, Sundown, was hauled from the Great Lake Superior to Fort Collins, Colorado, where she’s up on jack stands in the middle of a prairie dog field.

When we’re below decks, I try to imagine that we’re actually floating on water vs. air, but it’s a stretch most days…like today.

My husband and I had just arrived at our boat ready to begin another day of cleaning years of nastiness away. He grabbed one of the five-gallon buckets stored on the ground beneath Sundown’s underside to fill it up with fresh water while I set up the ladder and climbed aboard to unlock the main hatchway. I almost had the last number of the combo-lock dialed in when I heard a loud expletive from my husband. I looked over the side to see him leaping at least six horizontal feet away from one of the biggest snakes either one of us have ever seen. Thankfully it was a bullsnake rather than a rattlesnake and the camera was slung over my shoulder. Thus the photo of the creature with my husband near enough by to offer perspective about the snake’s length.

Coincidentally (or not), my husband said that as he was walking back to the boat with the bucket of water through the dry, dusty, weedy field, he was thinking it would be the perfect place to see a snake. Since I believe everything happens for a reason, I think it was Someone’s way of warning him to keep an extra lookout for long slithering danger (next time it very well could be a rattlesnake).

Lesson for today: keep handy an ample supply of absorbent pads, like the 3M variety available from Jamestown Distributors, “[d]esigned with quick and easy response in mind” for all those unexpected scares.

– krs