Anglers Gil Scharnek and Cal Lukasavitz were reportedly out on the lake one day when they spied what they at first thought to be a piece of debris or flotsam. Interestingly, there is a lake monster said to prowl Lake Pepin, the has been affectionately called “Pepie,” so one wonders if sharks are to blame for this phenomenon.Ĭoming back to Lake Michigan, it is incredible that there was yet another shark report in the days after this event. It was weak and dying from the cold, but it was still very much alive, and no doubt a frightening sight to see ensconced there at the bottom of a lake within this sunken hull.
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While the driver survived unharmed, salvage divers who went to in investigate the sunken vehicle got quite a fright when they discovered a full grown 5-foot long bull shark taking refuge in the wreck, lurking there in the murk. In February of that next year, a truck fell through the ice of Lake Pepin, which is more or less just a wide area of the Mississippi between Wisconsin and Minnesota. The whole incident would cause the creek to be closed off to swimming, just in case. The sharks were apparently then sent to the Minnesota zoo and survived the ordeal. When officials went about using electric shocks to stun the river fish of the area in an effort to find any sharks in the creek they were stunned themselves to capture two healthy juvenile bull sharks that had been lurking there alive and well. In the autumn of 2005 shark teeth were found along the Minnehaha creek, a very cold creek not far from the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, which were analyzed and found to be those of a juvenile bull shark and dated as being very recent. Besides the extreme distance from the ocean, authorities insisted that the dam system at Alton should have kept any bull shark from reaching the area, making its presence there very mysterious indeed.īull sharks have even been known to brave the extraordinarily the frigid waters of these northern locales.
The plan worked, and they began to haul up something very large and very pissed off, but rather than the granddaddy catfish they expected to pull up instead they found it to be a bull shark that measured over five-feet long and weighed 84 pounds, thrashing and biting rather threateningly. They at first guessed that it was a particularly massive catfish, and went about trying to catch it in a seine net. Indeed, in September of 1937, two fishermen named “Dudge” Collins and Herbert Copes began to notice that something was ransacking and damaging their fish traps in the Mississippi River near Alton, Illinois. For instance, bull sharks have been found up the Mississippi River as far as Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin. While it would have been quite a distance to travel for a bull shark, there have been reports of these creatures making their way hundreds of miles inland through river systems. This is actually not impossible, as bull sharks are well-known for their spooky ability to easily acclimate to freshwater, tolerating it for long periods and in some cases indefinitely, and they are definitely aggressive, blamed for all manner of attacks on humans. However, it was ascertained that it had perhaps been a bull shark that had made its way up to the lake by way of the Illinois River. This was understandably rather shocking, as this had been in a freshwater lake well inland and nowhere near the ocean. Adler would say of his thoughts as Lawson writhed about and the pool of blood spread in front of stunned witnesses, “I just couldn’t believe it, but I had to believe what I saw happening right before my eyes!” Lawson was rushed to the hospital, where doctors apparently were quick to recognize the bite wound as having been inflicted by a shark. One man named John Adler managed to reach the thrashing boy and pull him aboard the boat, where it was found that the victim was entirely missing one of his legs below the knee.