The Owens and Russell Sea Serpent: Sea Lions in the Strait of Georgia

The waters off Vancouver Island have a monster of their own. People call it Cadborosaurus. Most just say Caddy. By the early 1940s the legend already had a record. In 1933 Percy Elsey, a hotel owner at Oyster River, reported a sighting and shot at the creature. In 1937 a carcass was found at Naden Harbour. A serpent in these waters was not a new idea.

Inspector Robert Owens of the British Columbia Provincial Police commanded "A" Division of the force. A profile from around that time says everyone called him Bob. Twenty-eight years earlier he had been plain Constable Owens. With him was Staff Sergeant Jack Russell. Two experienced policemen. Not the kind of men who chase stories.

The Strait of Georgia. 1943. The exact day and the exact stretch of water are lost. The two officers saw a single great animal. A huge sea serpent with a horse-like head. Behind the head, a long body rolled through the water. Sections rose into view, sank, and rose again further back.

The surviving account captures the effect. "Their undulations as they swam appeared to form a continuous body, with parts showing at intervals as they surfaced and dived." Then comes the line that has been quoted ever since. "To the naked eye, the sight perfectly impersonated a sea monster."

Then Russell raised a pair of binoculars. The serpent came apart. According to the account, "with a pair of binoculars, Sgt. Russell saw that the strange apparition was a huge bull sea lion leading a herd of six sea lions." Seven animals. The bull at the front. Six behind him, surfacing and diving in turn.

The Vancouver Province ran the story on page 1 on 9 March 1943. No police report has surfaced. No photograph or film is known. Nobody has ever claimed a hoax. Even the newspaper story is known today mostly through later retellings.

Those retellings drift. Some call the officers Royal Canadian Mounted Police on patrol. Some give the animal a length of 30 to 40 feet, or move the scene near Victoria. None of it traces back to a source. In 1943 the provincial force, not the RCMP, policed British Columbia.

What makes this case rare is who solved it. Not a sceptic, years later. The witnesses themselves, on the spot, with better optics. There was a precedent. In 1928 T. R. Boggs reported a sighting at Alert Bay. George Nicholson later explained it as a bull sea lion swimming ahead of his group of females. "The bull always leads," he wrote.

Sea lions cannot explain every Caddy report. The northern sea lion grows to only about 10 feet 6 inches. Researchers list them alongside humpback whales, conger eels, elephant seals, oarfish and the basking shark. Still, the Owens and Russell sighting remains a standard example of how a line of animals becomes one serpent. Its most famous sentence even turns up in the Cambridge Dictionary, as an example of the words sea monster.