Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

I write my last post for True/Slant a bit worn out from a full day of kayaking yesterday. It was easy river kayaking, mainly, with just one madly technical section of Class 2 stuff, but a full day of paddling and some porting in the sun saps you a bit.

The sights and experiences were very nice: Osprey and kingfishers working the water. The boughs of huge sycamores whispering in the breeze. A shore nap of 15 minutes that felt like an hour full of dreams. A dash of adrenaline while being spun in the rapids.

Thanks for reading the Beaufinn blog. It was fun. If you would like to continue along, this blog will migrate to www.beaufinn.com/blog (or some iteration of that; Google the name) by mid-August. Web designers really slow down in the heat, don’t they?

What’s next for me? Working two contract writing jobs (corporate stuff), teaching at The College of New Jersey this fall, and staying on the ever-present quest, along with my agent, to sell one or all of the novels. Beyond that, I’d like to finally put some serious effort into the kind of mountain climbing/trekking I’d like to do. I might start in the Shawangunks, in the Catskills. I should, however, set some summiting goals for the next decade.

I have two requests of you, Beaufinn reader:

1. (Re)Read Deliverance: Yeah, yeah — macho white guys in canoes, etc. etc. Having studied with the man who write this magnificently original American narrative, I was always galled by the fact that in popular memory the story boiled down to Ned Beatty and some banjo playing (popular memory = didn’t read the novel and can’t remember much about the film).

This story is powerfully sublime; what lurks under the obvious physical action is moving and troubling, and stays in the mind for weeks after reading. Dickey wrote a very straight story in a time of postmodern literary experimentation, but the story is anything but easy. It is one of those novels you must read to understand a bit about America, particularly at a certain time (the early 1970s).

Also, read it for the wonderful owl scene, which occurs early in the action. This scene is not in the film version, but it is the strongest symbolic connector to Dickey’s poetry in the whole novel.

After that, if you can tackle the novel Dickey wrote after Deliverance, a tome called Alnilam, you’re ready for your PhD.

2. Once a week, disappear for half an hour: That’s a tough one for parents and people with demanding jobs. Maybe cut that to 15 minutes, but for that 15 minutes, belong to your own country — a one-person country located in a wholly unspecified place. Maybe you already do this, and can swing it for an hour. That’s good — now try for two hours.

Get free of the beeps, bings, pings, bongs, shouts, and the “Hey, where are you?” Leave the cell phone or PDA in the car or under a rock, give away your GPS unit, and go someplace that only you know, and only you know where you are.

Go off the grid, just for a short time. Clear your mind of the digital flotsam. You’ll be back “in network” soon enough.

You won’t need a map. Good luck.

# # #

Image by greyloch via Flickr

As the T/S farewells pile up, and tears are shed and toasts are made (midnight July 31 is endgame; even Gawker gave kudos), I have realized one thing about all my outdoorsy bloggin’: I never once talked about duct tape.

The reason being is that duct tape is as regular as air and water to the outdoors person. You really don’t think about it. It’s just there.

Look, I don’t know if you can repair an SR-71 or a Formula-1 car with duct tape, but tonight I did indeed duct-tape shut the inseam of my bathing suit in preparation for a day of kayaking tomorrow. Is that a total bachelor move, or just pure River Rat? Yeah — both.

Check this out: The duct-tape wallet –

Like many of you, I’m guessing, I always have a roll of duct tape nearby. I carry a roll in my vehicle, training bag, and on the boat. I’ve used it to do everything from secure a pheasant wing on a bumper to patch a leaky wader during a duck hunt to cover a blister on my big toe in the backcountry. But while on vacation recently my older brother, Christian, showed me a new use for duct tape.

It wasn’t an emergency and it had nothing to do with dog training, but it was pretty damn creative. He made a wallet from a few strips of duct tape. Not a clunky, sticky bunch of tape but a genuine wallet. In fact, he’s been using his own duct tape wallet for two years.

To be honest, I’m not too sure of the benefits of a duct tape wallet, but I do know you can peel some tape off if you need it in a pinch. And if you get tossed in the pond after you win a field trial your wallet will be fine. Or if your dog takes a liking to chewing on it, the replacement cost isn’t very high.

Four feet of duct tape and a pair of scissors. That’s all you need

That’s from Dave DiBenedetto, who writes the “Man’s Best Friend” blog over at Fieldandstream.com, all about his training his Boykin spaniel, Pritchard (he also wrote a great striper-fishing chronicle, On the Run.) Dave’s your man when it comes to Boykins, fly fishing the flats, and, clearly, duct tape. Read on.

And with apologies to Caitlin Kelly and Laurie Essig, whose posts I’ve read daily since I joined T/S, the photo choices that the Wordpress service offered for “duct tape” were a plain-old roll of duct tape and a young woman who had made herself some duct-tape underwear.

I selected for creativity.

Oh, and here’s a Hello Kitty AR-15, in case you wanted one.

via What is the Ultimate Use for Duct Tape? | Field & Stream.

Image via Wikipedia

While engaging with friends last night in the debate of the week — whether the Wikileaks Afghan Reports release is the digital-age version of The Pentagon Papers (it is) — we came upon a site called The War Project: Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Tell Their Stories.

The main page last night featured a statement by Sgt. George Zubaty, a native of Kentucky, Army infantryman, and son of a Vietnam War veteran, who said, in part:

The second deployment, the writing was on the wall from within a month or two of us coming back [from Afghanistan], that we were going to go to war in Iraq. The talk of deadlines and all that stuff, that’s just complete bullshit. It was obvious that we were going to go to Iraq.

I was told in 2003, on the tarmac, waiting in the hangar to get on the airplane to go to Iraq, to go to Kuwait. There was the number two guy of the 101st Airborne. Dave Petraeus was the division commander at the time, but he, I guess, was already gone. I mean, he had other things to do than to see off a battalion.

So this guy, he comes in and gives this rah-rah speech of, “Oh, we’re gonna be over here, and we’re gonna go and do this, that, and the other, and we’re gonna take down the government, and we’re gonna bring democracy.” It was like a talking point memo that you would see from the Cheney-Wolfowitz crowd. It was a ridiculous statement.

I was told, “You’ll be there for about six months, it’s all reconstruction after that, that’s all it’s gonna take.” They had written up a plan that said that. It was the most blatantly full of shit, starry-eyed crap that I’ve ever heard. It’s this power of positive thinking crap you get, where it’s like, “Well, this is what we’re gonna do.”

As if nobody else has any say in this. And reality can’t intervene. Because we’re gonna express our will in Iraq however we please. And it’s all going to happen according to plan because the plan is good. Because the people who made the plan are people I like. Or whatever. I don’t understand.

I realize it’s arguable whether or not you can project force in a place like Iraq and do what the ideal was: to take apart the government, to overthrow the regime, to rebuild the country. I don’t even necessarily think it was a terrible idea. I think the manner in which it was done was so hideously incompetent. It was based on people’s beliefs, rather than rational thought, and they’re two different things.

Zubaty’s words in that fourth paragraph above, “It was the most blatantly full of shit, starry-eyed crap that I’ve ever heard. It’s this power of positive thinking crap,” really struck me. I was glad, in a grim way, to hear someone who really ought to know say something about that horrid rah-rah power-of-positive-thinking crap that led to the debacle in Iraq, and which has led to other debacles (it leads to debacles high and low, whether at the municipal level or federal).

We don’t hear much about the War in Iraq these days, do we? Some days I wonder to myself if we pulled out months ago, the dearth of news is so significant compared to the coverage of the Bush/Cheney years.

Afghanistan has now become the theater of positive-thinking crap. What has eight years of fighting brought us?

As my friends and I read more on The War Project, I was glad to note that fellow T/S’er Susannah Breslin is the creator of this site, something that reminds me of a classic book called Nam, in which Vietnam veterans tell their own individual stories in their own words.

The fact that Zubaty’s father was a LRRP (“lurp”) in Vietnam, and that the son now gets to tell part of his story in The War Project, in digital media, brings the veteran’s tale into a new age, through a new generation of American fighter.

Maybe theirs is “not to question why” while in uniform, but veterans should be given every venue possible to tell us what worked, and what hasn’t, with no power-of-positive-thinking whitewash/hogwash painted over it.

via The War Project – Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan tell their stories.

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Before this week gets old, and July is over, I must inform you that this is my last week blogging for True/Slant. Numerous other T/S’ers are saying their farewells these days.

Once the sale of T/S to Forbes went through, back in May, everyone here wondered what that meant. Ultimately, it means that some T/S’ers have been or might still be snagged for Forbes work, while others received a letter dated June 22 telling us that our services were no longer required 30 days hence, and I was one of those (Forbes wasn’t about to take on all of us, and all those “unique hits” count for something). Not long after that letter arrived, I learned through direct contact with T/S staff that blogging was to continue as “normal” until August 1, and so I shall.

Here we are now, July 27, Tuesday, a day that in the past I used as “Off-Topic Tuesday” to take a break from the outdoors-related interests I usually pursued to discuss other matters of relevance.

This Tuesday is time to tie up a few loose ends — topics I jumped on that intrigued me, and so far don’t appear to have any conclusion.

1. The Aussie Super Shark: In October of 2009, reports out of Australia described a dead 9-foot great white shark that had been bitten nearly in half by another “super” great white off Deadman’s Beach.

I has my suspicions that this photo in the Daily Telegraph on-line had been Photoshopped because of a strange discoloration along a nearly straight line at the shark’s gills. I thought perhaps a shark head had been grafted onto a smaller shark body. I was wrong, however, as other reports with better details made clear that a very big great white did, indeed, bite this smaller great white.

Any further reports of a “6-meter” monster are scant. While Aussie fishermen set out more drum lines to try to catch the huge fish, the big great white shark never made headlines again. Yet. . .

2. The 700-Pound House-Crashing Black Bear of Incline Village, NV: Last autumn and early winter, Big Bubba, a 700-pound black bear, continued his habit of smashing his way into garages, houses, and sheds in rural Incline Village, NV, looking for edibles as he fattened himself for the cold months (700 pounds is a lot of black bear, about top-end size for this species). One home-owner who encountered Bubba in his living room fired a .44 Magnum bullet at Bubba’s head, but the bear’s heavy skull absorbed the round. Bubba later broke into a church and ate a bunch of food meant for a charity, prompting the pastor to ask his congregation to pray for the bear’s departure.

No word of Bubba surfaced this spring, when I wondered if he might reappear, looking for more easy pickings. Did he head off for new territory, or did he fall to that old Western aphorism, “Shoot, shovel, shut up”?

3. The Naked Runner of Waxhaw NC: Almost a year ago, a report surfaced via FOX News in Charlotte, NC, and that was picked up by Runner’ s World on-line, about a naked night-time jogger in the small town of Waxhaw. A number of reports said witnesses claimed to see a woman, while others thought the naked jogger might have been a man. In any case, the subject was exercising nude.

No other stories about this individual have since appeared. Some of the original posts are still intact on some sites, while other links are dead. So, did this story report on an actual person looking to rile his or her town, or find a little midnight nudist freedom, or might the whole thing have been a hoax? Did the actual naked runner get a little freaked out by the attention from a few national media outfits and give the running shoes a rest, or did people simply stop looking?

I’m sure the weather in NC is warm enough for another midnight streak.

4. The Python Invasion of Florida: No mystery here — Florida’s Everglades and other swampy-woodsy sections are now the playground for Burmese pythons, African rock pythons, green anacondas, and Nile monitor lizards. These species got a foothold due, in part, to animals that escaped pet stores after Hurricane Andrew, while others are the progeny escapees or exotic pets that people released after the reptile became a tad too large for pleasant interaction with guests, children, and small dogs.

The questions here are: How large a population of these exotic species will arise; i.e., what is the environmental “carrying capacity”? How badly will they impact indigenous species? And, finally, how far north might they travel? As I once suggested, when monitors are lounging in the cherry trees of Washington, DC, then increasingly serious attention might be paid to this problem.

Truth be told, however, these reptiles are here to stay. We can keep their numbers in check, but that’s about it. They are now American animals. Their lesson is for our future ability to police more effectively against others.

5. Buying Ronald Reagan Gold Through the New York Times: Back during the winter Olympics I was reading a hockey story in the NY Times on-line when I saw — I swear — an advertisement for a Ronald Reagan gold medallion. I was clicking for the next page of the story, but my mind froze. Gipper Gold? I clicked back and the ad was gone.

Further research was fruitless, but I know what I saw. So, now you know what I want for Christmas — no, not the medallion itself, just proof that it exists and that the NY Times actually carried this digital ad. (The NY Times endorsed Carter in 1980.)

6. The Big Hairy: Did I go on a group expedition to upstate New York on a search for bigfoot last October? Yes. Did I hear strange sounds at night on more than one occasion while there? Yes. Do I know what made those sounds? No.

The trip was exceedingly interesting, however, and I met a group of very fine people from a number of walks of life and professions who were as intrigued as I by this phenomenon that, as I point out in my series of posts about this expedition, might ultimately say more about human beings than zoology. That is, whether this primate species exists or not, something very interesting has occurred in human nature in regard to this — people are either seeing something real and hugely amazing, or they’re seeing something that isn’t there, but many many different people claim consistently to see the same thing, and that is very interesting, too. A recent CNN story suggested a “need” to see such a creature as a “safe way of experiencing fear.”

In an interview with Loren Coleman that I wrote up on T/S, he pointed out that 80% of such sightings are misidentifications of known wildlife in which the viewer fills in the gaps with bigfoot-ish details, and roughly 1% of sightings are caused by hoaxes. It’s that 19% to 20% of eyewitness reports that Coleman says are interesting, original in detail, credible, and worth true scientific study using numerous state-of-the-art methods.

My main interest is in the deep intrigue of the story as a whole, and in the narrative nature of individual eyewitness accounts, an interest that began as a kid when I was stunned by the notion that a large, hairy hominid-type species might live beyond known science in North American and Asia. That fires the imagination of any five-year-old who is being primed for his reading of various American legends, Native-American tales, Mark Twain, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and then J.R.R. Tolkien.

So, sasquatch gets to be the biggest loose end. If they don’t exist, however, we’ve already invented them:

Image via Wikipedia

Rounding a bend in the road around a local airport the other day, I glanced to the left and saw a cop sitting in the grass off the pavement. The white SUV was easy to see. The guy wasn’t trying to hide, but he didn’t need to because people love to come whipping around this particular stretch of road — it lends itself to speeding — and probably a few of them can’t slow down soon enough and shoot past the cop’s position.

As I passed him, however, I was struck by a very depressing thought: The day is coming when your car — your very own, much loved member-of-your-family automobile —  is going to fink on you, rat you out, and otherwise get you in trouble.

Oh, yeah. Because eventually cars will have a communication system that by law will have to be able to communicate with the police. This will be factory-installed in the name of safety. It will amount to this: You’ll pass by a cop’s location, and your car will tell the laptop in his car how fast you’re going.

Don’t think so? Live long enough, you’ll get to enjoy this and much more. Rental car companies are already letting subcontractors spy on you and fine you. Retailers are tagging their crappy clothes so that they can track your movements and spending habits. A respected American aircraft manufacturer, maker of one of the aeronautic icons of WWII, is proud to offer a high-altitude, long-flying spy drone that will undoubtedly spy on Americans. I’ve already written a post about the day when the Earthly landscape itself spies on you using “smart dust.”

I hate all this because I’m getting intensely beleaguered of being observed, tracked, and otherwise spied upon in “the Land of the Free.” I must point out, however, that at times I submit voluntarily to observation either because I simply can’t get around it, or a desired activity results in observation.

This blog and also my Facebook profile are examples of that voluntary action. Search engines survey the words I use in blog posts, and advertising related to the concepts of those words pops up on Beaufinn now and then. Some months ago when I wrote about wild boars in Germany, an ad for boar hunting in America appeared on my site.

As for Facebook, we all fell for it, really, including me. We unnecessarily gave away a ton of personal information, and that site is now obviously all about watching and monitoring people and their activity, and trying to sell stuff to them. I no longer post photos to my Facebook profile, and comment minimally on my own activities, because I find it akin to reporting on myself to both the world and also to a hidden authority about which I get to know nothing.

Privacy has become a commodity, and I’m starting to invest more and more, or at least try.

As for that idea about your car ratting you out to the cops, that’s not entirely about privacy, because if you’re just +2 mph over the limit, you’re doing that in public. What’s wrong with that is the passivity of it — that my machine, not I, files a report that I wouldn’t deign to file. The person is in charge of the machine, or should be. My car shouldn’t be making phone calls that I didn’t dial or wouldn’t dial.

Is it all about safety and peace of mind? Will we feel wonderfully secure in a world where our cars are talking to the other cars and regulating their speed together while we, in our GPS-tracked, holographic clothes, can spend the drive to work already doing work using our cranially implanted PDAs? While overhead, the drones know exactly who’s where, what they had for breakfast, how much they weigh, their blood sugar and heart-rate, and if they’re pregnant or not?

At lunch, you take a walk, and the genetically modified trees can detect the skin cells you shed. They record your presence in an embedded chip.

Oh, yes — trees will be computerized in the future.

I just wonder: How soon?

Image via Wikipedia

Every American airplane geek recognizes the term “Skunk Works,” and its logo, at left. It is the semi-comical name attached to the most cutting-edge engineering efforts by Lockheed Martin Corp. Years ago, the rudders of several SR-71’s flashed that cartoon skunk.

Now, a fly-rod maker has glommed onto the name, and named his business Skunkworks Fly Rods, and created his site as www.skunkworksflyrods.com.

Lockheed doesn’t like this, even if rod-maker Jerry Foster writes “Skunkworks” as one word, as BusinessWeek.com reports:

Lockheed Martin Corp., the world’s largest defense contractor, has told a maker of bamboo rods used for fly-fishing that his website infringes the company’s trademark.

Sections of a letter from counsel for Lockheed are posted on the Trout Underground blog site. In the letter, sent by Lynne Boisineau of Chicago’s McDermott Will & Emery, the fishing-rod maker was told his choice of skunkworksflyrods.com as a domain name “is in bad faith and is an attempt to profit off the goodwill of the Skunk Works trademark” and the misdirect the “unwitting public” away from the defense contractor’s official Skunk Works website.

The term had its origins in a “L’il Abner” comic strip by the late Al Capp, who used “skonk works” as a name for an illegal still in the swampy backwoods of Dogpatch, an imaginary town.

According to the database of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Lockheed first registered “skunk works” as a trademark in July 1981. The mark is registered for use with “engineering technical consulting, and advisory services with respect to designing, building, equipping, and testing commercial and military aircraft and related equipment.”

In November 2001 Lockheed added another registration for the mark, to be used with games, sporting articles and stuffed animals.

I’m not surprised by this. Everyone has to “protect the brand” these days, even if you’re the largest defense contractor in the world and you’re going to push around a very small-time fly-rod maker.

Maybe Mr. Foster is an airplane geek, too, and used the name as an homage to the fantastic Lockheed designs of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Or maybe Mr. Foster is a L’il Abner fan. If so, he might avoid a lot of hassle and legal fees by quickly changing the name of his business to “Skonk Works Fly Rods.”

However, has the expression “skunk works” or “skunkworks” moved into the American lexicon as a common term meaning a project with a “high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy“? Could this be the usage Mr. Foster intends, to indicate that his fly rods are not major-label items, but carefully crafted works of art from a small business that operates with minimal hassle and presents the same to its potential customers?

If so, perhaps Lockheed has no case? Their own linguistic invention has taken on a life of its own, and perhaps they can’t get it back.

This will be an interesting case on numerous levels: intellectual property, freedom of speech, and big-guy-versus-very-little-guy.

Keep an eye on it.

# # #

Thanks for a tip from MidCurrent.com.

via Gilead, Sperian, Skadden, Tata: Intellectual Property – BusinessWeek.

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Perhaps the tall tales harkening from Mark Twain’s time are true: giant blue catfish, big enough to swallow dogs, might swim in American waters.

Because every couple of years the blue-cat world record keeps getting broken, and fishing tactics can’t be getting that much better, or anglers that much smarter. So how much bigger is this species going to get?

Until 2005, the world record was a 121.5 Texas blue catfish. Then, in May of that year, a Mississippi River blue hit the 124-pound mark.

Now, a 130-pound Missouri River blue catfish might take the No. 1 spot, as Joel Currier writes in today’s StLToday.com:

It was a dead night on the Missouri River. Hardly a nibble on the line for hours. So as storm clouds rolled in about 12:45 a.m. Tuesday, Greg Bernal and his girlfriend decided they’d head for shore after 15 more minutes.

Then, suddenly, came a pull on the line stronger than Bernal had ever felt.

“That rod just started screaming,” said Bernal, 47, of Florissant. “I knew he was big. It raced out, I set the hook and there was no movement at all. I just kept the pressure on him and finally I could feel him thumping.”

Bernal landed the 130-pound blue catfish that officials say is big enough for a world record held since May 2005 by Tim Pruitt of Alton. Pruitt caught a 124-pound blue catfish on the Mississippi River near Alton.

The Missouri record, until Tuesday, was a 103-pound catfish caught with a pole and line in 1991 on the Missouri River.

Bernal fought his big catch for 15 minutes and spent another 30 minutes — with help from his girlfriend, Janet Momphard — pulling it into their johnboat as rain pelted them and lightning flashed. The fish’s teeth snagged Bernal’s hands and drew blood.

Bernal and Momphard, 47, a nurse from St. Charles, said they used 40-pound test fishing line and Asian carp as bait.

All I can say is that if you’ve got a girlfriend willing to help you wrestle a pig-sized catfish into the boat at 12:45 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in a thunderstorm, don’t screw that up (either catch, that is).

# # #

Note: That’s a channel cat in the photo, above. Looks good on the page, and I couldn’t find a workable image of a blue cat in the Wordpress system.

via Florissant man catches record-setting catfish in Missouri River.

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

You know how it goes: You’re wandering around in scrubby country, you’re a little hungry, and a little low on cash. You see a rattlesnake.

Pretty soon you’re back in your apartment at the hotel with a bucket of 27 rattlesnakes, eating some snake-on-a-stick, hoping to sell the rest of the serpents to science, when the wardens bust through the door without even phoning:

A Malta, Idaho, man found himself in a bit of trouble after he wrangled 27 rattlesnakes into a five-gallon bucket in hopes of finding someone who would buy the reptiles.

Terry Brian Teeter, 38, was issued two Idaho Fish and Game misdemeanor citations for possession, transport or shipment of wildlife on May 25, after Fish and Game officials found him and the Western rattlesnakes in his apartment at the Sunset Motel in Malta.

Teeter said he originally had 32 snakes but gave a couple away. He also skinned a couple, put them on hot dog sticks, cooked and ate them.

“They taste like chicken,” Teeter said.

Teeter has hunted rattlesnakes for 15 years but said he was unaware that a license was required to hunt rattlers in Idaho, or that a hunter may only take four rattlesnakes each year.

Teeter’s attorney, Don Chisholm, said most people seem to be unaware such regulations exist.

That’s from a story from over the weekend by reporter Laurie Welch, in the Times-News MagicValley.com, which covers news in the Twin Falls region.

Welch quotes Teeter, who has hunted rattlesnakes since age 15, as saying, “Everybody out here fears [rattlesnakes] for their cows, their horses and their kids. I hate the things. I have nightmares over them all the time.”

Rattlesnake collecting, killing, and eating is an old endeavor of our American brethren in the West and Southwest. This story, however, presents an interesting combination of succinct factors: personal tradition, hunger, psychological disturbance, and entrepreneurship. If you’re a cultural anthropologist, Freudian psychoanalyst (are there any of them left?), or economist, Teeter could serve as a day’s worth of lecture.

Personally, I wonder why we’ve never seen Mrs. Smith’s Snakes-on-a-Stick in the freezer section of our favorite grocery stores.

# # #

Note: Welch’s story doesn’t specify what species of rattler Teeter caught and ate, but they were probably Western diamondback rattlers. A photo accompanying the article depicts Teeter with what appears to be a small diamondback. The snake in the photo here is an Eastern diamondback

via Man cited for keeping rattlers in Malta home.

Image via Wikipedia

Everything in Russia is supposed to be bigger, meaner, and tougher than most everywhere else. At least, that’s the clichéd impression foisted upon the West by movies, TV, and cheap novels.

So, if Russia has its own Nessie-like beast, then of course the monster eats people, having devoured 19 anglers since 2007, as noted by The Daily Mail last week:

Russian fishermen are demanding a probe into a creature resembling the Loch Ness monster in a remote Siberian lake.

Locals say that ‘Nesski’ has devoured anglers who have been pulled into the murky waters of Lake Chany from their boats.

Those claiming to have glimpsed the creature say it resembles the classic long-necked image of Scotland’s fabled monster. It has also been called ’snake-like’, while other accounts suggest a large fin and huge tail.

The latest mysterious death of a 59-year-old man last week has fuelled demands for a proper probe into what lurks beneath the surface of Chany, one of Russia’s largest freshwater lakes.

‘I was with my friend… some 300 yards from the shore,’ said 60-year-old Vladimir Golishev. ”He hooked something huge on his bait, and he stood up in the boat to reel it in.

‘But it pulled with such force that he overturned the boat. I was in shock – I had never seen anything like it in my life.

‘I pulled off my clothes and swam for the shore, not daring hope I would make it.’

This report surfaced in the same week that approximately 1,200 Russians drowned while going swimming during a terrible heat-wave because many of those victims went swimming while drunk. Others were children who drowned while unattended.

To note that fact is not to attribute Nesski to the drunken impressions of Russian anglers. An investigation into what Nesski might or might not be could at least be interesting, but clearly that particular monster, toothy and lethal, is not as completely dangerous as vodka or parental inattention.

via The Daily Mail » Russian fishermen demand an investigation into killer Nesski’s 19 lake deaths  in three years.