Fishing for me was one of those activities where it didn’t matter how things went, just being outside and wetting my line was enough to improve any day. That’s a good thing too, as I can’t say I was a particularly good fisherman. I was more invested than your average bank-sitter who shows up with the wrong gear and leaves trash behind, but they call it “fishing” not “catching” for a reason.
All of this is beside the point as after what I saw last week, I can’t imagine setting foot beside a lake again. Hell, I get nervous being around any water these days.
My story begins with something any fisherman is familiar with: a snag. I fish on an old, artificial granite lake that is ostensibly used as an “emergency water source” for the surrounding towns, but in practice I don’t think it’s ever been used in that capacity. Because it’s meant to be used for drinking water in emergencies there are a lot of restrictions on what you can do on the lake. There’s no swimming. No camping. No boats of any kind (though you can rent a canoe from one state run place when it’s open, just be sure to be back by sundown when they close). This makes the water beautifully clean, but the fishing tough.
With how clear the water is, I typically had to use “imitation” lures. My go-to was the classic plastic worm rigged for the bottom. It looks like a dying fish and is supposed to be weedless, but at one spot on the lake I’d always plan on losing one or two lures.
Now when you’re getting your line stuck it’s normally because there’s some sort of structure under the water and these structures rarely move. We’re talking about things like fallen trees, boulders, hell even old cars and furniture from time to time. The only consistent thing about them is that once you know where they are, you can fish around them to avoid getting stuck.
This spot was different. It wasn’t in a particularly out of the way location like most prime fishing spots tend to be in fisherman’s stories. This one was right off the main service road around the lake and even had a little launch area in case Fish & Game needed to put a boat on the water. It was a little cove that pushed back off the main lake. Rocky shores, trees close to the shoreline. It really gave the place a claustrophobic vibe and on hot & humid days it was brutal, but the most distinctive aspects of this spot were two things.
First, the water was deep, and it got deep fast. I’m not sure total depth but from shoreline to ~20-30ft out we’re talking probably 40+ feet deep. This was odd, but a good thing for fisherman. The smallmouth bass in the lake were trophy quality and they tended to like deeper water with rapid depth changes just like this one. I honestly thought this was the likely reason for all the snags, deep water vegetation. The stuff is great to fish near, but can be brutal to get stuck in. This was reinforced by the fact that most of the time I managed to get a snag free, the line and lure would come back with a nasty, greenish sludge stuck to it.
The second was the smell.
I know what you’re thinking. “Here we go, it smelled like death, what an idiot. Why would you fish there?” But that’s not the case. The smell wasn’t entirely unpleasant. It was almost like the smell you get just after a fresh rain, but with a hint of fish or water vegetation. If you’ve smelled these things before you know what I’m talking about, if you haven’t I’m sorry, it’s just really hard to explain. It was the kind of smell you notice, but quickly get used to. I chalked it up to random chance given how the wind & water moved around in the lake. It did always seem like you could find a dead fish or two on the shoreline when I stopped there (especially right after winter when the ice finally thawed out), but the fishing was always solid, so I paid it no mind.
The leadup to what happened last week was a long one. You see, I’ve been fishing this lake for years and to say I’ve lost a few lures to this spot would be an understatement. Over time, the seemingly random nature of the snags started to annoy me, and the idea of taking a quick swim with some snorkel gear I had laying around from a cruse I took years ago started to pop into my head. I’d seen plenty of videos online of people “magnet fishing” and diving for “river treasures” and it didn’t seem that hard. Best case scenario I leave with a better understanding of the spot & maybe a few lures for my effort, worst case I leave cold, wet, and empty handed after not being able to see anything.
After a particularly tough day on the lake that was capped off by losing three separate lures at the spot, I made up my mind. I was going to see what was going on beneath the water, I just needed to figure out how to do it without getting kicked out of the lake by Fish & Game.
Remember, swimming was strictly prohibited, and it was strictly enforced. There were no boats allowed on the water except for the Fish & Game boat which vigilantly patrolled during the day to make sure people weren’t breaking the rules. It was honestly funny to watch as someone who wanted to fish from the spots where these kids would gather to try and swim, but in hindsight I wonder if the reason for their vigilance is more practical.
My plan was not a complicated one. The Fish & Game boat was most active during the “prime time” of the day, and especially on weekends. As the day wound down and the sun began to set their patrols would slow down and eventually stopped once the sun was fully down. I picked everyone’s least favorite day of the week, Wednesday, to make the dive. The sun sets pretty early where I live in the Northeast, so I wanted to be ready to go at 8:00pm.
When Wednesday came I let my wife know that I wanted to get some fishing in after work since it was a particularly stressful day at the office (she wouldn’t approve of me breaking the rules by swimming, no matter how innocent.) I grabbed my gear which was supplemented by a set of snorkeling goggles and a waterproof flashlight in case it was too dark to see hidden in my backpack.
I arrived at the lake right on time and without any issues. It was mercifully quiet as it looked like everyone else had headed home for the day. The sun was just starting to set and as the day cooled you could see a slight fog coming off the lake. For being so close to civilization, there were times that you really could forget home was just a few miles away.
I waited for the Fish & Game boat to patrol by and exchanged waves. I don’t know the names of the officers on the boat but we’ve grown to recognize each other by sight over the years. Once they passed, I knew I had at least 30m to get in, take a look, and get out before they were back. I took off my shirt, donned the equipment I’d brought with me, and silently slipped into the water just as the sun itself dipped behind the horizon.
My first thought on entering the water was “you didn’t think this through, idiot.” Sunlight is swallowed up by water very quickly, even in clear lakes like this one. With the sun behind the horizon and daylight fading fast I couldn’t see as far as I expected and everything had a surreal quality about it.
The water was cold, but not unpleasant and I was quickly able to get used to it. After checking the seal on my goggles, I started swimming slowly out to the middle of the lagoon looking down to see what my nemesis snag looked like.
What did surprise me a little was the smell. It got stronger in the water. Still not unpleasant, but even through the goggles I could tell it was there. There was also something new: a sound. It was soft, but got louder as I moved further away from the shore. A soft swooshing noise like leaves rubbing together in a breeze. The new sound only added to my curiosity.
The bottom of the lake looked exactly like I thought it would. Mostly rocky, some soft bottom parts where I could see some plants growing, and some logs, but nothing that housed a collection of lures in it like what I’d donated over the years. This did strike me as odd as at a certain point I was certain I had lost lures in the area before, but the bottom of the lake was spotless.
As I got further out the water quickly got deeper and combined with the rapidly fading light, meant I had to use the flashlight to make out anything on the bottom. This, naturally, added a bit of a creepy look to anything in the flashlight beam. Not being able to see exactly what was below me triggered an old fear of open water that I’ve always struggled with, but by looking up and reminding myself I was very close to shore I was able to relax a bit. I noticed that the vegetation on the bottom was getting thicker the further out I went and shortly I could no longer actually see the bottom, just the tops of these thick, lake weeds that I was now convinced were stealing my lures waving rhythmically in the current.
It was shortly after I lost sight of the actual bottom that I saw the first thing that caused me to stop in my tracks. Fish bones, and a lot of them. It started slowly at first, one or two fish wrapped in the weeds in various states of decay, but as I approached the center of the lagoon, the deepest part of this part of the lake, they got thicker.
There was nothing I’d encountered in my years of fishing that could explain what I was seeing, but I wasn’t panicking at this point. In fact, I was kind of excited to realize I’d found an explanation for the smell. This must be some sort of fish graveyard where the current brings all the dead things in the lake. That quickly changed when I noticed some of the bones in the deepest part of the lake were starting to look larger. The problem was, I couldn’t really make them out anymore. It was getting close to totally dark at this point and even with 20+ ft of visibility, I couldn’t make out the bottom.
Instead of doing the smart thing and heading back to shore, I decided I wanted to see what was going on at the deepest point. I told myself that diving 10/15ft down to get more light on the bottom can’t be that hard, can it?
So, I took a deep breath and dove. I’m not what you’d call an avid swimmer and if you’ve never tried to dive that deep unassisted before, it’s harder than you’d think. My surprise at how much effort it took to dive down prevented me from noticing that the moment I submerged myself in the water, something changed. The swooshing noise, which had continued getting louder as I got further out, had stopped entirely. It was dead silent.
After thrashing about for a few seconds and getting to what I thought was deep enough I directed my light back down towards the shapes I wasn’t able to fully make out previously and what I saw shocked me. No longer was it just fish bones, though they were still there in immense numbers, but now the corpses of larger animals could clearly be seen. My flashlight caught the clouded, lifeless eyes of a deer as I realized with horror that something else had changed. The weeds at the bottom the lake had stopped moving. The scene was surreal. Countless corpses of fish & animals seemingly frozen in place at the bottom of the lake. I’m not sure how long I hovered there staring, but it seemed like ages.
My trance was broken by the return of the sound and the sudden realization of what was causing it. The weed had started moving again, but this time their movement was anything but natural. I watched in horror as the less rotted of the corpses were pulled towards a 5ft opening in the weeds that sat at the deepest part of the lagoon. Simultaneously, I felt that shiver inducing feeling of your foot hitting seaweed when you’re not expecting and looked back at my feet to see a strand of the “weeds” had wrapped itself around my ankle. And it wasn’t alone
Below me I could see the writhing mass of weeds begin to rise up, grasping at me. The grip of just one of them wasn’t terribly strong and I was able to kick it off, but if two or three grabbed me it would be a completely different story.
So, I did what you’d expect. I swam for my life. The last thing I saw before dropping the flashlight was the opening in the weeds that had just looked like a soft bottom opening to reveal a circular, fleshy tunnel. Out of this tunnel the clean bones of fish and animals were being expelled while the undigested corpses were pulled inexorable towards it by the “weeds”.
I didn’t stop until I reached the shore and completely freed myself from the water. When I turned around to look back, I could see a black mass that looked exactly like weeds pushed as close to the shore as possible without leaving the water where none had been before.
I knew no one would believe me. Not with the lake this public. This close to towns & a major city. Why should they? I left without calling the police. Or Fish & Game. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure that Fish & Game’s patrols are just to keep the water clean anymore.
I don’t know what that thing in the lake was, or even if it is living “in” the lake versus it “being” the lake. What I do know is that I’m never going near it again. That, and that the next time I feel weeds brush against me when I’m in the water I won’t be taking any chances.