It reminds me of fishing off a pile of rocks on the tail water of a small dam. It was a fun two or three hours, lots of fish, and I was keeping a few on ice in a small cooler. A good sized Cottonmouth kept sticking its head out between the rocks and checking out my cooler. In the begining, I was using the cooler as a seat to set up my line, it kept coming back even when I shooed it away, so I started standing farther and farther away from the cooler.
When I've run into rattlers during regular bird season, it's usually a warmer day and they're out sunning, otherwise they're shutting down for the season. Snakes give me the willies, but any more I just walk around them and leave them alone. I worry more about the little ones when doing regular stuff like gardening, they usually haven't figured out that they can just slip away, and the only way they will do a dry bite is if they dumped the whole load on something else just a little bit earlier.
