Champ

When my brothers and I were younger, we attended a summer camp on the New York shore of Lake Champlain called Camp Dudley. It was a fun and fairly kooky place, and we all largely had a blast.

One summer pastime there was looking for Champ (or Champy), the Lake Champlain monster. Champ is the North American version of Nessy, the Loch Ness monster, and Lake Champlain is, in fact, very narrow and deep like Loch Ness. However, I must confess that Champ always seemed like a poor, less glamorous cousin to Nessy. Nevertheless, at least once or twice a summer, some campers would claim to have seen Champ, or to have seen something in the water that could not otherwise be explained. One summer I was in one such group, when we saw about four or five bumps in an otherwise smooth lake surface that did not act like a boat wake.

Now I am older and living on the Vermont side of Lake Champlain. To the extent I have ever thought about it, I have assumed there was nothing to the Champ thing, except maybe some half-baked attempt to stir up tourism interest.

But then this morning on VPR I heard a story about some scientists who recenlty came across some sonar readings that they could not explain. This link to a Burlington Free Press article is not nearly as good as the radio story -- by the end of the radio segment, I was truly beginning to wonder if they had stumbled onto something.

Who knows? Maybe those bumps I saw years ago were the real deal.