Cammie, the purported Cameron Lake monster, has made its presence known once again.

This time the creature was sighted by Coombs resident Kim MacDonald and her eight-year-old son Tristan, who were driving towards Port Alberni on just after 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 5.

“I had just picked my son up from school and we were driving towards Port Alberni and were getting towards the far end of the lake when something kept catching my eye,” MacDonald said. “At first I just thought it was a bird skimming across the water.”

However, as she got closer to the disturbance, that all changed in a hurry.

“There was an enormous splash, like when someone jumps into the water,” she said.

Where the splash had been, she said, there was now a large object — something that didn’t look like a log. To her, it looked alive.

“It was big,” she said. “My son said, ‘Oh my God, what’s that mum?’”

Fortunately, MacDonald was at a spot where it was possible to pull over to the side of the highway and she did.

“The head, if that’s what it was, was huge, bigger than a beaver,” she said. “I grabbed my camera and hopped on top of my truck.”

MacDonald was able to capture about a second and a half of video before she switched the camera to picture mode and snapped one shot before whatever it was sank out of view.

“After I took that picture it was gone,” she said. “I drive past there all the time and I’ve never seen anything like that before. It was round and big. My heart was pounding for a long time.”

The object or creature did not re-appear and MacDonald and her son continued on to Port Alberni.

“When I came back later I kept looking for it, really looking, but it was gone,” she said.

MacDonald has no theories about what she saw, although she has a couple of ideas about what it wasn’t.

“I think it’s definitely not a fish or a beaver,” she said.

Cameron Lake has long been reputed to have some form of large creature living in it, with numerous reports over the years of brief sightings of strange ripples and other disturbances in the water. The lake made national news last fall when a team of Vancouver cryptozoologists made an expedition to Cameron Lake to investigate.

Source: BClocalnews

Was it a fish, an eel or some kind of serpent-like creature?

She says she didn’t know. But Horvath grabbed her camera and managed to fire off one shot before the batteries failed.

The researchers who specialize in looking for so-called crytozoological creatures — in other words, monsters — spent Saturday on the lake probing the depths with a sonar-like fish finder.

At first, they picked up a couple of large contacts at the bottom of the lake, about 45 metres deep, then something more pronounced on a second pass.

”Something just went `ping’ on the alarm on the fish finder and we saw this absolutely massive object in the midst of various fish,” said John Kirk, president of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club.

They made four more passes and the contact held stable, making it unlikely that it was a school of fish, which tend to scatter eventually, Kirk said.

”We were quite stunned that there was something that big in the lake and it was in about 60 feet of water, less than 30 yards from shore, it was quite amazing,” he said.

Horvath, who lives in Nanaimo, said she was driving along Highway 4 on July 30, 2007, when she saw a strange semi-circle in the lake.

”You could see like a serpent shape,” said Horvath, who isn’t the only person to report something strange in Cameron Lake.

”It wasn’t logs,” she said. ”It wasn’t waves. There were no boats in the area. It was, like, right there. You could actually see a large fish, (an) object, no, not an object, something alive.”

Kirk, who admits his trip to Cameron Lake is being sponsored by the local Oceanside Tourism Association, said the team accidentally lost its underwater camera and was unable to explore further.

Because the weather will deteriorate in the fall and winter, another search will have to wait until next year, Kirk said.

But the team has narrowed the possibilities.

”Maybe it’s a sturgeon, maybe it’s a giant sterile eel….it could be a massive type of salamander,” Kirk said. ”Or it could be something that we’re completely unaware of at this point.”

However, it’s unlikely the small lake is the home of a mysterious sea monster, Kirk said.

”I’m not going to the extent to say there’s anything exotic down there, there’s just something big.”

Kirk has searched for the Ogopogo in Okanagan Lake in the B.C. interior, looked in coastal B.C. for the Sasquatch, tried to find the sea creature Cadborosaurus off Vancouver Island and has hunted for giant salamanders in swamps.

He’s been to Scotland and the republics of Congo and Cameroon in search of strange dinosaur-like beasts.

But it’s British Columbia waters that provide a fertile hunting ground for animal tales, he said.

Kirk said there are 41 different lakes in British Columbia where strange animal sightings have been reported.

”In B.C., we just seem to have a ton of these lakes where these things have been seen,” he said.

Kirk said Cadborosaurus’ range is not confined to the Victoria area. Reports of a similar animal have come from the Gulf of Alaska to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico.

In Oregon, the animal goes by the name Colossal Claude.

But Kirk believes British Columbia is in a class by itself for what he calls crytozoological encounters.

People have actually started to embrace the strange animals to the point where they are showing up in tourism brochures, he said.

”Like Moberly Lake up in the (northeast) area, the First Nations there got in touch with me and told me about the creature that they had been seeing with a horse’s head swimming around in the lake, and now they’ve given it a name,” Kirk said.

”They call it Moberly Dick.”

Source: amherstdaily

Kirk co-founded a B.C. group dedicated to hunting unidentified animals, or cryptid, and said he and his fellow members of the Scientific Cryptozoology Club have been fielding calls from people who say it’s time to take a closer look. The author of In the Domain of Lake Monsters plans an expedition to Cameron Lake to look for scientific evidence on Sept. 19.

This initial inspection will determine whether or not people are mistaking natural phenomenon for a cryptid, Kirk explained.

Once he and his team rule out things like submerged rocks or logs, they will return for a more in-depth analysis. So far, people have described the creature as long and serpent-like.

One woman captured a photograph of a similar silver shape, an indication that it could be a fish, which would be just as interesting for Kirk because there are no known species of fish in the lake that can get that big, he explained.

The 70-member club has experienced field researchers from all around the world but its small size and small budget often limit the expeditions they can go on. Oceanside Tourism, which represents both Parksville and Qualicum Beach, contacted the group and offered to sponsor the trip.

“We’ve gotten some feedback from people who are concerned that if we find something it will stop people from swimming but it doesn’t stop people in Okanagan,” Kirk said. “There are no reports of anyone getting attacked at one of these lakes. In fact, it’s a great tourist attraction. People make an absolute fortune on this type of thing.”

Lakes in the province are notorious for creature sightings, according to Kirk, who said there are 39 lakes with some sort of sighting reports. With very few of these sightings confirmed, Kirk does not expect to find anything in Cameron Lake his first time out.

Source: canada.com