Strange Find in Lake Okanagan
Lake Okanagan in Canada is said to be the home of a
water monster called Ogopogo The lake is approximately 120 kilometres long; 3.5
kilometres wide and is 235 metres at its deepest point. Indigenous people have
legends about a monster in the lake. To the syilx, it’s n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ which
means “the sacred spirit of the lake. To members of the Westbank First Nation,
n ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ and Ogopogo are two separate things.One is a spirit and one is an
animal.
There
used to be all one connecting lake, Okanagan and Skaha, and there are stories of caverns that connect the two where a creature could live.
Sightings are reported of a creature 20 to 50 feet
long, with a horse shaped head and an undulating serpent like body.The first
recorded sighting was by John Allison in 1872.
In 2000 marathon swimmer, Daryl Ellis, reported
being accompanied for a short distance during his swim by two large creatures
as he passed Rattlesnake Island. He described them as one being 6 - 9 metres
(20 - 30 feet) long and the second being smaller. They followed him for quite
awhile and then disappeared. When he swam near Okanagan Lake floating bridge in
Kelowna, a creature with a large eye the size of a grapefruit came within 9 metres
to get a close look at him.
A south
Okanagan man is convinced he’s captured the most conclusive piece of evidence
yet of the legendary and elusive lake monster in the Okanagan known as the
Ogopogo in june 2011.Jim La Rocque was enjoying his mother-in-law’s lakefront
property with his two children in Kaleden, B.C. on June 1 when he says he
noticed an inexplicable wake on Skaha Lake.The longtime Okanagan resident said
he couldn’t believe his eyes.La Rocque believes he witnessed a giant,
serpentine creature swimming across the lake with at least seven fins paddling
in sync.He estimates it was at least 36 metres (120 feet) long.“I’d describe it
as like a dragon boat race, like with oars, so if you flipped the dragon boat
upside down, you would see all those oars coming out of the water,” he said.
This recent
article caught my eye:
Having
been scuba diving more than 2,000 times in Okanagan Lake, professional diver
Kevin Aschhoff was rather surprised to discover something he'd never seen
before.Crawling along the edge of a boat wreck 30-feet below the surface of the
water was an Okanagan crayfish four times the usual size for this species,
measuring roughly a foot in length.Native Okanagan signal crayfish generally
grow to about three inches in length, so Aschhoff's discovery during a night
dive last September has surprised experts who did not know the crayfish could
grow to such sizes."(The crayfish) is the size of a lobster and way, way
larger than any known crayfish in the Okanagan," Institute for Underwater
Research founder Raphael Nowak told iNFOnews.ca. "It's a very interesting
phenomenon."
Which poses an interesting question. Could Ogopogo be
a known creature that had grown to four times
its normal size? If some form of gigantism occurs to creatures in the lake what
could Ogopogo be? An eel,a fish, a snake ? Maybe if you have some ideas you can
leave a comment.
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