So here's something weird. Saskatchewan's got its own lake monster - the one nobody really talks about - and it seems to have completely vanished. Not in the dramatic, mysterious way you'd hope for with a cryptid. More like everyone... just stopped seeing it.
The stories go way back.
Some say the first documented encounter was fishermen complaining about massive holes torn in their fishing nets back in the 1920s. The Cree folks who lived here before that? They had stories about people vanishing in certain parts of the lake.
The Thing in the Water
Here's what people say they've seen: something between 3 and 9 meters long, depending on who's telling the story and how many beers they've had. Sometimes it's scaly. Sometimes it's smooth like a wet telephone pole. The head? Take your pick - dog, seahorse, pig.
One guy named Gordon Watt saw it back in the day and said:
"Its head looked like a seahorse."
The most believable sighting I've come across was from Rob Grosse, a Saskatoon guy who saw it as a kid in 1985. He and his brother were out in a canoe with a little four-horsepower engine when they spotted what looked like a floating log. Good Samaritans that they were, they headed over to tow it out of the way. Except it wasn't a log. It was dark, wet-looking, had bumps on its back, and when they got close enough to realize what they were looking at, they gunned that little engine and hauled ass back to shore.
By the time they dragged their parents down to the beach?
Nothing. Just calm water.
The Boring (But Probably True) Explanation
Gord Sedgewick, a fisheries biologist with Saskatchewan's Ministry of Environment, has the most reasonable take. He figures it's probably a lake sturgeon - maybe a couple of them - that swam up from the North Saskatchewan River during high water and got stuck when levels dropped. "Sturgeon have a very long life span, so the few that may have entered the lake could have stayed there for many decades."
Makes sense. Sturgeon can live over 100 years and grow massive. They're bottom feeders, so you wouldn't see them much. And get this - the same thing happened at Candle Lake, where they actually caught some river sturgeon that had made the journey upstream.
The weird part? Nobody's ever caught a sturgeon at Turtle Lake. Not in test nets, not in commercial fishing operations.
Nothing.
Where Did Our Monster Go?
Here's the thing that gets me. The 70s and 80s were apparently the golden age of Turtle Lake Monster sightings. Newspaper articles, eyewitness accounts, the whole deal. These days? "nothing has been reported in recent years" according to that same fisheries biologist.
Maybe the old sturgeon finally died. Maybe people got too skeptical to report what they see. Or maybe - and this is just me thinking out loud here - our monster got tired of all the attention and found a deeper hole to hide in.
Whatever the case, our prairie lake monster has been keeping a low profile for decades now.
While everyone's fussing over Ogopogo out in BC or tracking every ripple in Loch Ness, our creature just quietly faded away. No merchandise empire. No tourist buses. Just the occasional old-timer who remembers when something used to scare the hell out of fishermen on calm days.
Maybe that's the most Saskatchewan thing about it - even our monster doesn't make a fuss.
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