The things I have to share the road with

[GoodOlBoy]

took this picture from my vehicle going home yesterday. This guys head was bigger than my fist. He just sat there while I snapped a couple of photos and talked to him, but I did give him the right of way on the road.

GoodOlBoy

[Adam Helmer]

GOB,

Great photo! I hope you kept a safe distance while taking pictures and chatting with this guy.

Adam

[Larryjk]

GOB, Those snappers can really raise hell with a slow thumb. When I was a high school kid one of those grabbed my thumb when I was trapping (setting a leghold trap under a cutbank.) It doesn't take long to retreive your hand and fortunately I had on fairly thick rubber gloves so when I yanked hard my thumb slipped out of his mouth. He still had that rubber glove in his mouth when I put a cylinder of .38 Specials through the back of his shell.

[GoodOlBoy]

lol yeah Adam the silver thing in the lower right hand corner is the bottom of my window on my car door. I just rolled it down and snapped a few with my cellphone. I wanted to move him out of the road, but I wasn't feeling frisky enough to jump out there and grab at his tail.

Larryjk we once had one of my great grandfather's coon hounds get a loggerhead snapped onto the piece of flesh between his nostrils. It took three grown men and a teenage boy to hold down the dog, cut the loggerhead's head off, then cut the jaws apart to get him loose. If one the size of this one bites you he is keeping whatever he bites :D

GoodOlBoy

[Larryjk]

Just remembering the pain of the short time the turtle had my thumb in his mouth, padded by that rubber glove, I could certainly understand why your coon hound didn't enjoy the experience.

[buckhunter]

I hate it when my Gkids go fishing and catch one of those things. We have some biggins up here and when they snag one you know they torment it. I'm all over them about it to no availe.

[Larryjk]

We didn't have many where I grew up because we didn't have many large streams. My father said those turtles were so tough because they wouldn't die until after sundown.
Maybe he was right.

[multibeard]

I caught one in a 330 conni one time just after ice out. I do not know how it got in as far as it did because ti was a little wider than the trap. We ended up putting it in a cooler over night to get it dormant enough to get it out of the trap the next morning.

I have moved a ton of them off the highways over the years. You just have to get a good hold of the tail and keep it away from your vitals.

Back in the middle 50s we used to fish off everyones docks. Many times we would have a nice stringer of pan fish only to pull it up to find a stringer of fish heads. There would be a snapper the size of a wash tub laying there eating out catch.

Many time when boating down the lake wqe would stear around what we thought to be a 6 inch or better dead head that had floated out from the old booming grounds at the head of the lake. Only to have it go down when we got close. Snapper again.

It was good that my dad sold tackle in his gas station as more than once a snapper would take my bait and strip the black dacron line off my oold casting reel getting away.