The last time Adam McGirr visited Cameron Lake, he was hot on the trail of Cammie, the elusive lake creature.
Was the thing people reported seeing in the lake a giant sturgeon, a relic from the days of the dinosaurs or perhaps just a family of otters, swimming one behind the other?
Despite two expeditions to Cameron Lake from his home in Vancouver in his capacity of vice president of the B.C. Scientific Cryptozoology Club, McGirr and his colleague, John Kirk, were unable to solve the mystery.
Now, however, McGirr said the club, which studies reports of sasquatch, lake monsters and other supposedly mythical creatures, was able to solve at least one Cameron Lake mystery, even though this one is a whole lot smaller and doesn’t have big teeth.
McGirr said he was recently contacted by a woman who was puzzled by something she found in the water.
“A lady was on the shore and noticed a rather large object floating in the water,” McGirr said. “She hauled it out and was puzzled as to what it might be, so she sent it in to me.”
McGirr was unable to immediately identify the object, so he went online to ask for help.
“At first glance it looks like it might be the remains of something long and scaly,” he said. “My first instinct was to call it the trunk of some kind of tree but after scouring a database of trees native to Vancouver Island and other parts of the world, I couldn’t find anything like it.”
McGirr posted a photo of the object on the web and it wasn’t long before he had the information he was seeking.
“I posted it to a web forum frequented by biologists with a request for identification, and within just a few hours I had an answer,” he said. “It was a water lily root.”
It was a pretty mundane answer to a potentially intriguing question, but McGirr was satisfied with the outcome.
“Despite it not belonging to any sort of long, creepy creature, it was rather satisfying to actually solve a mystery for once,” he said.
Although the Crytozoology Club has no plans for a fall expedition to Cameron Lake this year, that doesn’t mean they’ve given up the chase to identify Cammie. McGirr said he plans to attend a symposium on sturgeon to determine if large sturgeon could exist in Cameron Lake.
For his part, Kirk has more ambitious plans. He is jetting off to Africa soon to search for the Mokele Mbembe, a dinosaur-like creature rumoured to live in the Congo.