Creature record / 1968
August 1968. Night in Pirates Cove, on De Courcy Island in British Columbia. A family sloop lay at anchor. Aboard were Capt. William Hagelund, his two sons and their grandfather. Something small was swimming at the surface. Hagelund put the dinghy in its path and scooped it up with a dip net. Under the sloop's bright lights they saw a slender animal about 16 inches long. Plate-like scales. Tiny sharp teeth. A flipper-like tail. They kept it in a bucket of seawater. Then Hagelund let it go. Decades later it would be called a baby Cadborosaurus, and then something far more ordinary.
The coast of British Columbia has its own sea serpent, known as Caddy. In 1995 Bousfield and LeBlond gave it a scientific name, Cadborosaurus willsi, and made the Naden Harbour carcass of 1937 its type specimen. Capt. William Hagelund knew these waters. Born in North Vancouver in 1924, he went to sea at 16 with the Consolidated Whaling Company fleet. He spent 14 years at sea, then 30 years as an engineer at Molson Brewery.