Cadborosaurus

In the coastal waters of the northeastern Pacific, from the waters off California northward through British Columbia and southeastern Alaska, sailors, fishermen, and beachcombers have reported encounters with a large, long-necked sea creature for well over a century. The creature takes its name from Cadboro Bay in Victoria, British Columbia, and goes by the nickname Caddy, a casual diminutive that belies the genuine strangeness of the reports associated with it. The northeastern Pacific is among the world's most productive ocean ecosystems, its cold, nutrient-rich waters supporting an extraordinary diversity of marine life, and investigators have long argued that an undiscovered large animal in this region is not inherently implausible.

The Saanich and other Coast Salish peoples had their own names and traditions for unusual creatures inhabiting Pacific coastal waters long before European settlement. When 19th-century missionaries and traders began recording Indigenous testimony, accounts of enormous serpentine sea animals were already well-established. The modern legend coalesced in 1933, the same year Nessie fever gripped Scotland, when Victoria Daily Times editor Archie Willis named the creature Cadborosaurus willsi after a string of reported sightings around southern Vancouver Island. The name was partly whimsical, but the reports themselves were submitted by credible witnesses including naval officers and experienced mariners.

The most compelling physical evidence came in October 1937, when a partially digested carcass was reportedly removed from the stomach of a sperm whale caught at the Naden Harbour whaling station in the Queen Charlotte Islands. Photographs taken at the time show an elongated creature with a small, horse-like head, a long neck, and an apparent tail. The carcass was not preserved for scientific study, and only the photographs remain. Researchers LeBlond and Bousfield, who wrote the definitive English-language study of Cadborosaurus, concluded after examining the photographs that they were inconsistent with any known marine animal and proposed the name Cadborosaurus willsi for a potentially undescribed species.

Witness descriptions across the decades are broadly consistent: a creature 20 to 40 feet long, with a long, flexible neck, a horse-like or camel-like head, a series of humps or a serrated dorsal ridge, and flippers. Movement is described as vertical undulation, and the creature has been reported moving at considerable speed, sometimes described in the water by kayakers close enough to see detailed features. The waters of the northeastern Pacific, with their extraordinary marine biodiversity and depth, remain among the most plausible environments on earth for an undiscovered large marine animal, and Caddy continues to be reported by fishermen who know these waters intimately.