Sea Serpent Cadborosaurus Calling!
Even land-locked Kelowna has its own sea serpent, Ogopogo.
For almost a century, hundreds of witnesses have claimed to have seen B.C.’s fabled sea serpent, Cadborosaurus, better known as “Caddy,” frolicking in southern Vancouver Island waters.
Their sightings have inspired legends, jokes and, thanks to Victoria’s enterprising Chamber of Commerce, world-wide publicity.
To the skeptics Cadborosaurus is a myth, an illusion, a hoax, ranking with Sasquatch, ghosts and UFOs. When they grudgingly concede that the many credible witnesses who’ve reported sighting Cadborosaurs over the decades may have seen something, they suggest floating logs, groups of sea lions and seals. For many years the B.C. Provincial Museum credited sightings to “bull sea lions”.
All quite probable, of course, but experts in the relevant fields of biology, icthyology and oceanography readily admit that the world’s oceans yet retain many mysteries.
The tantalizing headline that appeared in the Oct. 5, 1933 Victoria Daily Times.
Why not Cadborosaurus?
My late friend and Chronicles’ researcher Doris Benjamin once pointed out to me that there have been close encounters in Cowichan waters, too. For example: In January 1937 somewhat tongue-in-cheek newspaper headlines told of the experience of five men, in two separate incidents, off Crofton:
“Famous sea serpent pays New Year visit to Cowichan–is 35 feet long and looks like camel (or alligator!)–is friendly with fish and doesn’t mind visitors.”
First to spot the unusual visitor, on Thursday, January 7, was Capt. M.A. Corfield and two crewmen of the Nanaimo tugboat Solander. Four days later, J. Highsted and H. Dingee sighted what they called a “mighty queer animal” in the same area.
After assuring the press that neither of them had been drinking, the latter said that they were fishing, “when, in among a lot of floating bark...we saw the water sort of pushed up from beneath in a cloud of foam and something come to the surface.
“Ah, yes, you’ll say it was a whale and the spray, was it blowing. But it wasn’t. I know a whale when I see one,” swore Highsted (or Dingee, the newspaper not identifying the speaker), “and this thing wasn’t a bit like a whale. Why, when I first saw it, I thought of the seven-headed dragon that you read about in the Bible.
“It was huge. Simply tremendous. Like a swimming camel, the biggest camel in the world. We saw it four times, and the last time it was only 100 yards away. Oh, we wouldn’t mistake it for a whale, I can tell you.”
The witness said that a camel was the best way to describe the creature: “First the head would come above the surface–just the head–and it would swim along a bit that way. Then the neck would rise up–a neck about six feet long–and finally the body would come into view.
“The back of it rose three feet above the surface. It had long hairs–like a donkey’s hairs and just about the same colour, a sort of grey. And when it came up you could see the wet hairs flopping down on its back.
“All along its back was sort of serrated. We figure it was 35 feet long. You won’t believe us, but it’s the truth. It was closer to 40 than 30 feet. No, I wouldn’t say it was serpent-like. It was too big [sic] for a serpent, too thick through. It may have had a tail, though, that we couldn’t see.”
Fish were jumping all about the creature, apparently not the least bit perturbed by its presence.
Neither were Highsted or Dingee, as it was “quiet and peaceful... Just came up and swam slowly with its long neck sticking up in the air. If we’d had a rope we could have lassoed it. Or if we’d only had a camera–then people would have to believe us!
“We didn’t [really] believe it ourselves. But I’m telling you, it was plain daylight and bright sunshine, and four times we saw something that was huge and had a long neck and long hairs, and wasn’t any whale.”
Capt. Corfield and crew had also glimpsed the beast four times, the last when it raced past the boom of logs they were towing and disappeared into Osborne Bay. The towboat men estimated the “thing” to have been 30 feet long, light grey in colour and somewhat akin to a very large alligator with a small, flabby fin running the entire length of its neck.
Six years later, Mr. and Mrs. F. Bonsall sighted a similar creature, 300 yards off shore, just north of Crofton. They said it was about 50 feet long and watched it for more than an hour–when “Caddy” suddenly turned out to be “seven sea lions in a line, bobbing up and down...in succession, thus creating the illusion of one animal undulating through the water.”
The Bonsalls (obviously good sports) said anyone could have been fooled at that distance as the sea lions “went at a good speed and kept in perfect line.”
Two fishermen reported a serpent-like creature in Sansum Narrows, in 1950. In 1954 it was suggested that a committee be formed of three “responsible citizens” to investigate reported and continuing sightings of Caddy. But it was a serpent in Cowichan Lake that made news copy five years later when 81-year-old fisherman A.E. Johnston of Honeymoon Bay claimed to have battled the monster for four hours until his 60-pound fishing line snapped. Undaunted, he returned to the scene with 500 feet of three-eighths-inch-thick manila rope and three-inch-long hooks, but was unsuccessful in staging a replay.
In May 1963, a Manitoba visitor made headlines when she snapped two photos of an alleged sea serpent cavorting in Mill Bay, and the waters off Crofton were the scene of yet another sighting in 1988. J.B. Creighton and David Savage were less than 500 yards distant when a strange creature surfaced, startling some ducks. They said it was brown, with a head more like that of a cow or a horse than that of a fish, with a multi-humped back, and they watched for a minute and a-half before it plunged from sight.
Recalling the 1937 sightings, the news account concluded: “The fact that the two previous occasions of which the serpent was seen were at a somewhat similar season of the year...and at Crofton, lends weight to the belief that with now seven eyewitnesses to swear to its presence, there must be ‘something in it.’”
1937 was a busy year for serpent sightings. Farther north, at Naden Harbour, whalers discovered an amazing creature in the stomach of a sperm whale they were butchering. The long tail-like body and horse-like head reminded them of a baby dragon—nothing like any sea life they’d ever seen before. After taking photos they shipped it off to the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo where it seems to have vanished in fact and on record.
According to First Nations’ legend, this one suspiciously fanciful, Caddy rates as one of Vancouver Island’s original inhabitants, dating all the way back to when the Island “first emerged from the sea”.
At that prehistoric period, the legend goes, the Island’s sole inhabitant was a beautiful maiden named Cadboro. So lovely was she that the gods preserved her from “the touch of men” until the fateful day a reckless brave named Saurus wooed and won Cadboro’s heart, the pair eloping by canoe for the Olympic Mountains (thereby forsaking Vancouver Island for what’s now Washington State).
So angered was the god of air and water that he transformed himself into a giant eagle and, swooping down, he carried off Cadboro and deposited her upon the Victoria shoreline as a hump of stone—today’s Gonzales Hill. Saurus, he turned into a sea serpent and banished him for “a billion years to the depths of the ocean” where he resides to this very day (between sightings by shore watchers and boaters).
Ergo Cadborosaurus—thanks to a Victoria Daily Times editor in 1933 when reporting the sighting by Maj. Langley and Mr. Kemp.
Seaman James F. Murray is credited with first sighting Caddy in the fall of 1928 while fishing off the Victoria Breakwater. Murray later described the giant creature as “moving fast, at about eight knots, 25 yards from me, [when it] submerged and came up seemingly only seconds later a mile way”.
One of the most credible encounters occurred in October 1933.
Maj. W.H. Langley, Clerk of the Legislature, and Fred Kemp of the Provincial Archives swore that they’d seen a monster the size of but quite unlike a large whale, just 100 feet distant, off Chatham Island. For Kemp it was deja vu, he having seen a similar creature in the same area a year before. He recalled that it had a serrated back “like the cutting edge of a saw,” and moved like a crocodile. He thought it to have been at least 60 feet long and five feet thick.
The same month as the Langley-Kemp sighting off Chatham Island, a telegraph linesman working between Jordan River and Port Renfrew, reported that he’d shot at a sea serpent with his .30-.30. When struck by the rifle slug the stricken creature had thrashed about wildly, thrust its head 15 feet above the surface, and paddled off, the extent of its injury unknown.
Unfortunately, although some 600 people have reported sighting a mysterious creature or creatures cavorting in southern Island waters prior to 1959, no valid photographs were taken Not even by well-known Victoria photographer Wilfred Gibson who once came close. Upon observing a strange animal “frolicking among the log booms” at Mill Bay, he’d run closer for a better look—leaving his camera in his car.
Perhaps the greatest problem in taking a photo, as a naval officer who once spotted Caddy explained, is the state of the witness at the time. “I don’t mind admitting, I was terrified,” he said, “especially when he snapped his jaws. If I had had a camera I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have been able to use it, as I was so affixed by the sight.”
He probably wouldn’t have been frightened by the sea creature that was sighted at the entrance to Active Pass in June 1967.
Oil rig workers watch, enthralled, by strange creatures picked up on their video camera. --Drawing by Beverlee (Bejay) Clark.
This was no serpent but a topless mermaid with long blonde hair and the lower body of a fish or porpoise. A ferry passenger even managed to take a photo of “her” while she rested on a jutting rock at Helen Point.
A Cobble Hill man also snapped the creature from his plane; both photos showed a silvery object on the rock beside the creature and it appeared that the “mermaid” was eating a large salmon.
Another passenger on another ferry who chose to remain anonymous was able to zoom in on the creature with his 10-power binoculars. “It was definitely a girl,” he said, “definitely. The salmon had a big bite out of it. She didn’t pay any attention to the boat going by.”
In fact, she seemed to enjoy the wake of the ferry washing over her.
Charles White of Victoria’s famous Undersea Gardens publicly posted $25,000 reward for the mermaid if she could be convinced to sign a contract with his tourist attraction. He said he’d offer her a substantial salary, room and board and a supply of those special combs that mermaids use...”
The next sighting of a topless, dimpled blonde who was half-woman, half-fish occurred at Sayward Beach by Mrs. J.M. Reifel who wasn’t afraid to give her name to the press. She sighted the creature while taking an early evening stroll along the beach. “I thought at first it was just some girl getting a tan, but then I could see the tail. I guess she was about 200 feet away.
“I was hurrying toward her, but then she looked over and saw me, I guess. I lost sight of her when I climbed among the rocks, and when I go to where she’d been, she was gone.”
Although Mrs. Reifel was convinced the mermaid was a fake, someone staging a hoax based upon the recent publicity about a mermaid in Active Pass, she noted that the rocks where she’d seen it were wet. And they didn’t appear to be a comfortable resting place, either. For a sunbather, “It was prettychilly, with the wind and all. I felt kind of sorry for her. But I guess she must be used to it by now.”
But the dimpled blonde wasn’t the only one playing practical jokes.
Coincidentally, in Cowichan Bay, approximately 20 miles from the Sayward Beach sighting, several participants in a fishing derby reported seeing at a distance what they took to be a mermaid. They were soon in pursuit and overtook what turned out to be a...dummy.
In August 1972, Colwood RCMP were alerted that two teen-aged boys had sighted a “silvery monster” in Thetis Lake. In fact, one of them had been cut on one hand by six razor-sharp “points on the monster’s head”. They told police they were driven from the lake at dusk by something triangular in shape, about five feet high and five feet across at the base. “The boys seem sincere,” said an RCMP officer, “and until we discover otherwise we have no alternative but to continue the investigation.”
There was no further word of the Thetis Lake sighting.
As recently as 2010 two researchers of the B.C. Scientific Cryptozoology Club used a fish-finder to track a creature that has been reportedly seen in Cameron Lake for years.
Not to be outdone by Victoria’s renowned Cadborosaurus, some B.C. localities have staked claims to their own ‘sea’ serpents, notably Okanagan Lake’s Ogopogo.
POSTSCRIPT: In March 2020, Paul Henri LeBlond passed away, aged 82. His wasn’t a household name although he was well known in provincial scientific circles for his award-winning expertise in physics and, primarily, oceanography.
Quite unlike most of his fellow scientists he publicly proclaimed his belief that sea serpents, in particular, Cadborosaurus, really do exist. He even co-authored two books on unidentified marine mammals. He also co-founded the International Society of Cryptozoology and the B.C. Scientific Cryptozoology Club.
(For further reading see Cadborosaurus: Survivor of the Deep, Paul LeBlond and Ed Bousfield, and Discovering Cadborosaurus with John Kirk and Jason Walton.)
SEE ALSO: Are they out there? John Magor’s UFOs
Have a question, comment or suggestion for TW? Use our Contact Page.