Rob and Dave Grosse's Turtle Lake Monster sighting, Kopps Cove, Saskatchewan (1985)

Turtle Lake lies in west-central Saskatchewan, about 100 km north of North Battleford, near Livelong and Turtleford. It is about 28 km long and up to 5 km wide. Around 1923, fishermen found large holes torn in their winter nets. The talk of something big in the water never really stopped, and the 1970s and 1980s were the peak years for sightings of the Turtle Lake Monster.

The Grosse family kept a modest cabin at the lake from 1978 to 1987. In the summer of 1985, by his own account, Rob Grosse was 12. His younger brother, Dave Grosse, was 10.

Early August, 1985. Evening, around supper time. The sun had not yet set and the water off Kopps Cove was very calm.

A few hundred feet offshore, something was floating. "Is that a log floating there?" Dave remembered thinking. To Rob it looked like a power pole. "We thought 'Somebody's gonna hit it.'" So the boys took a beat-up canoe with a four-horsepower outboard and went out to tow it out of the way.

Then they pulled up beside it. In Rob's words, they "realized it wasn't anything of the sort; instead, it was a large fishlike creature, perhaps seven to 10 feet long." There were "bumps on its back that were dark in tone, wet/reflective in texture and appearance." It lay quite still, barely moving. Dave saw the dorsal or tail fin. "We were literally 10 feet away from it," they said years later. "It was not like anything we had ever seen before, ever."

They opened the throttle and raced back to tell their parents. Moments later the family stood on the beach. The water was calm. Nothing was there, and the parents saw nothing. "I wish to this day I would have had a camera with us." Rob wrote the encounter down in a journal, a boy's handwritten account that is the only record from 1985. Its text has never been published.

Rob told the story in The Flatlander in February 2023. In August 2025 both brothers spoke to Brittany Caffet of 650 CKOM. The details shift between the two. In the interview they were 11 and 9, they first saw the shape from the beach, and the creature was "dark green," with "like scales" and "this pointy fin." This time a massive tail rose once before it slipped beneath the murky water. No one has alleged a hoax. No news story or official record of the sighting from 1985 has been found.

The leading suspect is the lake sturgeon, and Rob accepts it himself, "perhaps two or three of them." Sturgeon carry rows of bony plates along their backs. Murray Koob of the Ministry of Environment said they can reach 8 to 9 ft and live 150 years. Fisheries biologist Gord Sedgewick suggested they could have come up the Turtle River from the North Saskatchewan River in a high water year. Yet as Sedgewick noted, "sturgeon have never been caught in any test netting surveys, nor in any commercial fishing nets." A test net sweep in the 1960s found nothing.

Rob Grosse now lives in Saskatoon. He researches the creature, runs the Facebook page "Stories Turtle Lake Monster" and has put it forward as a possible Canada Post stamp. His sighting sits beside others from the same lake. Gordon Watt said "Its head looked like a seahorse." Charlie Kivimaa saw something "like a whale." Across the prairies, Manipogo of Lake Manitoba keeps it company.