OBN Wants to Know:

Your Scariest Outdoor Scenario

Are you sure you want to know, OBN? I’d tell you, but you’ve already heard it if you read the blog. Probably more than once. It’s a long, pitiful tale of two friends lost overnight in a vast Wilderness Area along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Ok, we were like a mile from the road as the crow flies, but if you’ve never climbed around in our Southern Highlands you can’t know that a mile “as the crow flies” can sometimes take you all day.

So we won’t rehash that old story again. Let’s go with my second scariest moment in the Great Outdoors. It involves a lake which is supplied water by way of a swampy old creek. It just so happens to be the lake where I caught my biggest bass ever. He hit a spinnerbait in January of 1988 I believe it was – and he was somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-16 pounds. I let him go. The dam burst later that winter and the lake drained. OK, end of that sad story.

So I’m fishing this lake – I called it “Gary’s Lake” because 1. It didn’t have a name and 2. because my friend Gary lived there in an apartment on a point out into the lake. You can imagine a nice, soothing, blue water, fun-in-the-sun lake if you like – but this thing wasn’t any of that. It was always stained, if not muddy. Chocolate milk would be more “see thru” than Gary’s Lake in winter. So I’m fishing Gary’s Lake one night….it’s about 4 a.m. That’s right you trout snobs, I was fishing for catfish!

I caught a nice one around 5 a.m. and had him in the cooler, his head and tail bending up to meet the lid. There were bigger cats in this lake, but that was the largest I’d ever caught personally.

So about 6 a.m. the sun starts to come up – or rather, it starts to get light outside at least. And that’s when I saw it. Across the channel where I was fishing and heading for an island out in the middle. The lake was very narrow in front of me – 30 ft. to the other bank – and then, to my left opened up into the main lake. The island was no bigger than the average living room. The thing was gigantic, and it was moving, and I could not understand what I was seeing.

It moved from my right to my left out toward the island. I’ll describe it to you now, but you should probably not read this if you’re about to go to bed and have nightmares about …well….

What I could see of this thing – which looked like it’s back, was a large hump. Not like giant tortoise large. Like hippo large. Only it wasn’t elongated, that I could tell – it was more like a perfectly round, symmetrical dome. It was pushing water in front of it – and I guessed the “dome” part to be about two feet high, out of the water. It was moving about the speed my jon-boat moved across the lake with an old Sears trolling motor. Two, maybe three mph, max.

I thought to myself ( as I rubbed my eyes and tried not to panic): “….it’s moving away from me. it’s moving away from me. It’s headed to the island….ok….ok…then we’ll see what this thing is….when it comes out of the water….it’s still moving away from me….”

When it got to the island – about five feet from it…….the “dome” part did a half-roll forward and two fins flipped up out of the water and disappeared. The fins, longer than the “dome” was high, had to be 3 ft. long or more. I could see, with the morning light very bright now, that they were like fish fins. They were “ribbed” and semi-transparent. Green in color. I can still see the water spraying off of them as they flipped into the air and then went down…much like a diver with fins would dive …but this massive green thing was no human being.

Over the years I’ve tried to figure out what it was. I’ve tried to explain it to myself. I don’t really care if anyone else ever believes me, because I know what I saw. And I know it was not: a deer, an otter, a turtle, a carp, a cow, a seal, a manatee, a giant frog(?), etc. etc. etc.

I don’t know what it was. I just know I didn’t fish “Gary’s Lake” again at night alone. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve been night fishing alone since that night. It really creeped me out for a few years.

True story. There’s some weird stuff out there. I’ve seen it.

{ 5 comments }

Rebecca February 7, 2012 at 4:04 pm

Kinda like your own Loch Ness Monster…except it’s the Gary Ness Monster.

That woulda creeped me out bigtime. Outdoor Fear #2 for me–large bodies of water that could be home to strange and unusual creatures just waiting to eat me.

Glad you shared your story, my over active mind needed more scare for the fodder =)

Kev2380 February 7, 2012 at 6:28 pm