I was thinking the same thing as brian. There is a lake here that is infested with the water snakes and if you don’t know what they are, they scare the crap out of people like me. They do this sneaky thing where they swim right up underneath you when you’re fishing and suddenly you catch this slithering beast right under your feet and you crap your pants. Most of the yokels think they are cottonmouths. It’s a good thing for the snakes. They get left alone.
There are some cool pictures on this page. LINK
A lot of the ones I see are colorful and about 2′ long but don’t have much girth to them. They get angry if you try to displace them with the end of a fishing pole.