Mysterious sighting on Okanagan Lake

By J.P. Squire
Monday, July 13, 2009

Was it Ogopogo, a large snake-like creature or a sturgeon?

Wendy Sanderson and Gordon Krug agree on one thing: they saw the most amazing creature in Okanagan Lake – whether or not it was Ogopogo.

Sanderson, 41, who has lived in Kelowna since she was four, and Krug, an Edmonton welding teacher, were both at the Okanagan Centre boat dock at 10:30 a.m. Thursday because family members were taking a scuba diving course.

“There wasn‘t a single boat on the lake. It was completely calm, absolutely perfect, just the most pristine conditions for this viewing we had,” said Sanderson.

“I‘m not saying I saw Ogopogo. I‘m saying that I saw a big-ass snake-like creature in the lake. It scared the bejeezus out of me. It is creeping me out.” Now, she‘s concerned about allowing her 13-year-old son, Kurtis, to scuba dive as deep as 30 metres near the Bennett Bridge in a couple of weeks.

“It was so huge; I would have said over 30 feet. I‘m thinking, a good three feet out of the water. It formed two to three humps at the same time as it was swimming or slithering from the east to the west across the middle of the lake. For three minutes, we watched it and then it was gone. It was the most amazing thing we ever saw.”

A 22-year-old man fishing off the dock was so surprised he dropped his fishing rod.

“The welding teacher was pacing up and down the dock, screaming at everybody that would listen. He wanted everybody to experience it. I just watched. I had my cell phone on the beach, but I didn‘t even run for it to take a picture. I just wanted to watch,” said Sanderson.

The creature she saw was too large for any snake ever documented by scientists, she said.
“A lot of people are saying: ’Wendy, what if that was a group of sturgeons?‘ There‘s no way they could have been that synchronized while swimming. I‘ve been looking up sturgeon and those are fish. They can‘t form perfect humps out of the water to be able to pull off what we saw. There‘s no way.” “Our giant sturgeon?” responded Krug with a laugh when asked about the sighting.

“About a mile out from us was distinctively what you would say Ogopogo is. There‘s three humps, right? The more we watched it and watched it and watched it, you could see how mistakes have been made over hundreds of years,” Krug said.

“It appeared to be a giant sturgeon. As it went in and out of the water, there were three humps. I‘m convinced it was a sturgeon,” he said, despite the lack of any evidence of sturgeon in Okanagan Lake.

“What else could it be? Whatever it was, it was definitely there. There was something in the water that was definitely cool, really neat. Because of the way it was coming out of the water, it appeared to have three humps. It was massive, I‘d say 30 feet long,” he said.

“It was absolutely dead calm.

“We were a mile back and you could clearly see the way water was moving around it. You could see it moving in the water and the way the water was affected by it.”

Ogopogo?

“I don‘t want to be called a freak in public,” Krug said with another laugh.

The “once-in-a-lifetime” sighting ranks right up there with watching the 1987 Alberta tornado that killed 28 people from three blocks away and seeing a red, fiery meteor passing over his head last November, he added.

Sanderson wrote down all the details and sent them in a letter to Kelowna Ogopogo expert Arlene Gaal so the sighting can be documented for historical purposes. Sanderson also received a call from a woman who also saw something in the lake and they compared their experiences.

“Thank goodness, I wasn‘t by myself. Am I getting razzed. My coffee group is razzing me. My friends.

“But I‘m putting it out there, saying this is something that we saw, the three of us,” she said.
“I actually witnessed the most incredible sight in Okanagan Lake. I believe that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I shared with two other witnesses. We stood there together for that moment in absolute amazement. We do not have proof of this sighting, but we know what we saw and we shared it together.”

If people want to know more about the location, Sanderson is willing to rent a boat and go from the launch to the exact area where the creature was sighted . The excitement still hasn‘t worn off.

“I‘ve been vibrating for three days,” she said with a laugh.

However, “I will never swim in the lake again. I will not jump over the side of boat in the middle of the lake. I will go to the shore because I can now see that he or she likes those deep waters.”

http://www.kelownadailycourier.ca/stories.php?id=198344