Sea Monsters

 I’ve seen every documentary about the Loch Ness monster and all of his cousins ever made.  Shows about “Champ” from Lake Champlain or “Ogopogo” from Okanagan Lake in British Columbia will always get me to watch.  There is even the legend of “Peppie” from Lake Pepin right here in Minnesota.  When I lived in Northern Minnesota I heard from more than one source of an alleged thing that lived in Farm Island Lake by Aitkin.  Every winter it supposedly would show up at someone’s spear hole and scare the hell out of them.

Now I won’t go so far as to say that I’ve actually seen a version of Nessie, but I’ve seen some things.

My kids say there is no such thing as monsters.  I disagree.  Check out a tiger, a great white shark, a grizzly bear, an anaconda.  These are all monsters as far as I’m concerned.  They will all kill and eat you.

Same for crocodiles.  I saw one once.  This was an American crocodile, not known to be as vicious as their Nile or Aussie cousins.

This one was in the Flamingo Marina.  Sarah and I rented a canoe to take out into Florida Bay.  “Is that a crocodile I just saw?’ I asked the gal at the concession.  “Oh yeah, that’s Sarge, just stay away from him and he won’t bother ya.” 

I’m pretty bold when it comes to approaching various creatures, but I’m going to go ahead and steer clear of the 12-foot-long friendly dinosaur living in your marina, especially when I’m in a canoe.  Sure enough, we quickly and quietly paddled by while Sarge glared at us from fifty feet away, avocado eyes and his algae covered scutes barely showing above the dark water.

Another time farther north along the Gulf Coast a giant manta ray coasted silently past, just above the bottom in the clear water where we were staked out for tarpon.  My friend John, who is as cool as they come, said in his understated way of talking “Wow man, that’s some Discovery Channel shit right there…”

The thing was as big as the boat, and I was fully puckered until it was well past us.   It looked super sinister, perhaps deserving of its nickname “Devil Ray”, but we all know they are harmless.  But what if it jumped and landed on your boat…?

Now this next sea monster isn’t so easily explained. It wasn’t exactly a monster, but could be perhaps better described as a freak of nature.  I was much farther north, on Big Boy Lake near Remer, Minnesota.  I was out with a couple of friends, mostly fishing for bass, mostly catching pike.  My friend Dan was driving his Tuffy boat from one spot to another, I’m sitting on the front deck.  He happened to be looking back at the wake when something caught his eye.  He cut the throttle and went into a hard turn. He was looking back, yelling something and pointing to where the boat has just been.  “What’s going on, what did you see?” I yelled.  “I don’t know… I think it was a…a…a…muskie?”  [He later said that what he saw was WAY too big to be a muskie, but it was the only thing he could think of at the time] That’s all I needed to hear, the boat was coasting to a stop and I had already stood up and was casting a black Eagletail in the direction he was looking.  Muskies are known to come up in a boat wake, so this isn’t unheard of.  What is unheard of is the thing that came up next to the boat.  It was a turtle.  A snapping turtle. 

We’ve all seen big snappers before, I’ve seen hundreds, maybe thousands of snappers in my life. I’ve been known to grab one on more than one occasion.  This thing was so much bigger than any other snapper I’ve ever seen, it was like a different animal.  It was over two feet across, and its head was the size of a football. It dove back out of sight almost immediately, not before we could all point and yell “AAAAIIIGGGHHHHH!!!! Look at that!!!!”.  Let me say again, all of us in the boat are very familiar with snapping turtles, and we all got a good look at this one.

If you look at a picture of a full-grown example of the common snapping turtle’s southern cousin, the alligator snapper, you get an idea of the size of this thing.  Our northern snapping turtle, called “common snapping turtles” have a max weight of 75 lbs.  Coincidentally I had a magazine back at camp that had a picture of the Minnesota state record snapper, which was around 75 lbs.  That night I dug out the magazine and we laughed–the thing we saw was easily twice the size, probably more.  Alligator snappers often achieve triple-digit weight, and reports of them up to 400 lbs. are out there.  Was what we saw a lost alligator snapper?  They are known to be as far north as Illinois.  Maybe someone transplanted one.  Or just due unknown circumstances did a common snapper greatly exceed its normal lifespan of 100 years?  I was on this lake with my kids last summer.  When we were swimming I couldn’t help but wonder if this creature was still prowling the lakebed.

To this day Dan and I will reminisce about that day and what we saw.  Ask him, his story is the same as mine.

Next sighting was even farther north.  On Lake Chauekuktuli in Alaska.  Tikchik Lodge alumni know this lake.  It’s nestled in the Taylor Mountains, 23 miles long and 900 feet deep, it is one of several big deep lakes in the headwaters of the Nuyakuk River, which feeds the Nushagak River.  It’s a 20-minute boat ride from the lodge, and is home to abundant lake trout and char.  On the day of the sighting the weather was very uncharacteristic for Alaska-bright sun, no wind, temp in the 70s.  I had two guests in the 18-foot Lund, we passed through a connecting river known as the Northwest Passage and were headed across Chauekuktuli to fish in front of the Allen River.  

Enjoying the glass calm boat ride, I was about half way across when I saw something come to the surface right next to the boat and immediately dive down again.  We were moving along pretty fast, and I remember thinking “Whoa, that was a big snapper”.  I can still picture what I saw—the back end of a big turtle as it dove away. The Boy Lake incident was still semi fresh in my brain, having happened just a couple years before, and as I’ve said before, seeing big snapping turtles isn’t that unusual.  This thought was quickly replaced with the fact that there are no turtles [or any reptiles] in Alaska!  I cut the throttle and circled back.  The guests wanted to know what was up, said “I don’t know, I saw something…” I circled around slow, looking for any other signs of life.  Whatever it was didn’t show itself again, so we continued towards the north side of the lake, and I looked back over the glass surface of the lake as we went, hoping to spot whatever it was re-emerging from the depths.

Back at the lodge that afternoon I cautiously told the boss about what I saw.  “Was it a seal?” he asked.  I don’t think it was a seal.  A seal would have been a hundred miles from the ocean and would have has to swim up some serious rapids to get there.  I still don’t know what it was.  A loon or an otter? I would have seen them pop up for air.  Another misplaced giant snapping turtle?  A swarm of burbot?  Or an unknown creature.  There have been sightings of large creatures in many Alaskan other lakes.

 

Now its going to get weird.  Or weirder.  The previous stories all could have a logical explanation.  Not this one.  Closer to home this time, I was fishing from my float tube on Little Falls Lake in Wisconsin. This is a 200-acre reservoir with a max depth of 20 feet.  Not a big lake.  At one time it was a great bass fishing lake, and I used to fish there a couple times of year, usually with friends.  On this day in May I was fishing solo, and the lake was fishing really well.  I caught a bunch of bass, and a few were five pounders or bigger.  If you don’t know, a float tube is basically an inner tube with a nylon cover and seat.  You propel yourself along with flippers on your feet. No matter how hard you try, there is no going fast.   A typical day of fishing this lake will have you starting at the access and then fish around the lake counter-clockwise.  It takes the better part of a day to fish all the way around.  I found myself straight across from the access and rather than coninue the loop all the way around I  decided to call it a day and cut scroos to the access. 

Takes about 15 minutes to go across and I was admiring how torn up my thumb was from all the bass as I slowly flippered along.  Something caught my eye in my peripheral vision.  I faced the direction I had seen it, towards the upper end of the lake and I thought how if this were on the ocean I would be certain that I had just seen a dolphin.  Now, as I am looking right at the spot, a dolphin surfaces in classic “dolphin style”—head, dorsal, back, tail, moving from right to left, about 150 yards away.  WTF.   I know what you’re thinking, and this lake does not have sturgeon.  It does not have muskies. And it definitely does not have dolphins.  So, what did I see?  Or…what happened to make me think I saw what I saw?  At the access there was a guy I knew, I told him how I had just seen a giant “fish”.  “Probably a carp” he said.  It wasn’t a carp, I’ve seen a million carp.  It was way bigger than any freshwater fish. This lake was drained a few years ago to rebuild the dam, and I’m pretty sure that if the remains of a dolphin or plesiosaur turned up on the dry lake bed it would have made the news.  I can’t explain it.  I read a lot about weird paranormal things, stuff like parallel dimensions opening up, time travel, all the crypto zoology stuff.  Let me be clear, I don’t think there was actually a dolphin or other giant creature, but for some reason my brain thinks I saw it.  When I tell someone this story, I don’t expect them to believe it, I don’t expect you to believe it now; I don’t even believe it.  But the image of that dolphin still lives in my brain.

Maybe this is why I’m not quick to dismiss when someone says they’ve seen a bigfoot, or an alien, or Jesus, or a ghost.  I wasn’t there.  Who am I to say what you saw?  Just like you were weren’t there that day on Little Falls Lake.  I’ve had two different guys tell me about muskies they’ve seen that defy explanation, they were so big.  Muskies in the 7 – 8 foot range.  These stories come from sane men that are believable in every other way, have caught a lot of what most would consider to be “big” muskies [more like 4 – footers], and would have nothing to gain by telling me their tall tales.  I wasn’t in the boat with them, I don’t know what they saw.

 

I was just finishing this up when there was a knock at the front door.

I open it and there’s this cute little girl scout.

And she was so adorable, with the little pig tails and all.

And she says to me, “How would you like to buy some cookies?”

And I said “Well, what kind do you have?”

She had thin mints, graham crunchy things, raisin oatmeal, and I said “We’ll take a graham crunch.

How much will that be?”

She looks at me and she says, “I need about treefiddy”.