Monster mystery on Cameron Lake

September 21, 2009

John Kirk scans the choppy lake surface with his binoculars and shakes his head.

“When it’s choppy like that, there’s no hope for surface observation,” he said.

Kirk, the president of the B.C. Scientific Cryptozoology Club, was on the shore of Cameron Lake Saturday, on an expedition to look into reports of sightings of strange waves and wakes on the lake surface that might indicate the presence of a large, as yet unknown animal.

The wake was photographed by area resident Bridget Horvath in August of 2007 and a subsequent story in The News elicited a small flood of other reports, bringing Cameron Lake to the attention of Kirk and his team.

While Kirk said it is unlikely that a body of water as small as Cameron Lake could serve as a home to a creature that has been estimated by some to be as long as 12 feet or more, he said the number of reports seems to indicate that people are seeing something real.

“It could be a number of things,” he said.

“A bunch of otters swimming in a line can look uncannily like Ogopogo. So can swimming beavers or muskrats.

“Another possibility is that it could be a sterile eel, which can get up to 12-feet long.

“It could also be a sturgeon, although there are no reports of sturgeon being caught in this lake.”

Another possibility, Kirk said, involves gusts of wind being funneled down the long, narrow lake, causing what he called windrows.

“It’s basically a wake that’s created by the wind,” he said. “You can even get the effect of whitecaps on the font, but it’s not an animal. It’s just the wind.”

The possibility of it being a Cadborosaurus, he added, is remote.

“The lake is very small,” he said. “There are lots of fish in it, but I don’t know how an apex predator could survive here, unless it can make its way to the ocean through underground tunnels.”

Adam McGirr, the club’s technology expert and self-proclaimed gadget guy, said while didn’t expect to see an as-yet undiscovered life form — known as a cryptid — he did hope his underwater camera would spot some clues about what could be behind the reports.

“This will help us look at the bottom of the lake in certain areas,” he said. “When it gets too deep, towards the middle, it will help us see the average size of the fish here. As well, there are reports of a couple of rocks submerged in the water that could be mistaken for a creature when the wind whips up, making it look like water spraying over the back of something, so we would like to take a look at that, too.”

Along with the underwater camera, McGirr said the boat was equipped with a fish finder, so if anything large was spotted on it he hoped to be able to maneuver the camera to be able to get a visual image of it.

“Someone staying at the Cameron Lake Resort saw a really big object on their fish finder, so we might end up getting a signature of something really big, too,” he said. “There’s a rumour of there’s a plane that went down in the lake some 15 or 20 years ago, down there, so we’ll see if it shows up on the fish finder as something long and potentially monster-like.”

The team, which also included Horvath and fellow club member Sebastian Wang, spent Friday away from the eyes of the media, scouring the lakeside and investigating the site where Horvath’s photograph was taken, as well as the area around Angel Rock.

While their first day of shore-based observation on Friday went well, Saturday’s search — which featured a media tour in the rented craft — at first did not.

The plan, Kirk said, was to get out on the lake with one team and study the underwater landscape with the fishcam while a second team did shore-based observations, looking for any clues of ripples or other anomalies.

The plan quickly began to unravel however. The first boat, supplied by the Oceanside Tourism Association, proved to be too big to launch from the beach and had to be driven back to Port Alberni and replaced with a smaller one.

Meanwhile, although their shore-based excursion Friday saw ideal conditions — smooth water with virtually no wind — Saturday was blustery, bringing whitecaps to the lake and making surface observations of ripples or wakes virtually impossible.

Once the second boat got underway, the underwater camera search proved short-lived. Mere minutes after Kirk and McGirr lowered the camera over the side by its 50-foot cable, they found out the water was too dark to see anything much with it. Worse was to follow.

As the boat made a turn to circle back to the beach to drop off one group of media and pick up another, Kirk, who was manipulating the cable, felt it jerk and pull, before going ominously slack.

The cable had been sliced cleanly in two by the boat’s propeller, leaving the camera to sink to the lake bottom, some 70 feet below.

Clearly disappointed with the setback, the team returned to the beach, where more trouble loomed.

As the second group prepared to board, the boat swamped, forcing team members to bail frantically with whatever was at hand — from a hand pump to paddles.

As the second media tour headed out into the whitecaps, McGirr was philosophical.

“I’m not too upset about the camera, although I’m a little disappointed,” he said. “We had a good look around yesterday and we are not giving up yet. This mission was just the first exploration. It’s like fishing. If you dangle a line for just five minutes, you aren’t likely to catch anything. Patience is a virtue.”

The team’s dogged perserverance appears to have paid off.

Noting the last two reported sightings of the creature were in the area of Angel Rock, the team motored there, scanning the bottom with the boat’s fish finder.

“Just off Angel Rock we encountered a very large hit on the fish finder,” Kirk said. “It was far larger than any fish we had encountered that day. To ensure that is was not a misreading or a school of fish moving through the area, we went over that area four times in 20 minutes and each time the object was in the vicinity each time we passed over. It appears to be organic, but that is all I can tell you.”

The hits intrigued Kirk and his team and he said they plan to return to the lake to study the phenomenon further.

“We found it very unusual for there to be something that big in the lake, so it has prompted us to start making plans to return to the lake next summer — if we get the kind of sponsorship we did this time,’ Kirk said. “I am still not convinced there is a cryptid in the lake, but there is something very large. It could be an eel, a sturgeon, a large fish or even a semi-waterlogged tree trunk, but it may also be a unknown animal and we are obliged to put this story to rest, one way or another.”

http://www.bclocalnews.com/vancouver_island_central/parksville_qualicumbeachnews/news/60056822.html