Champlain is a very deep, spectacular hundred-mile-long lake that runs north and south between the states of Vermont and New York and reaches into the province of Quebec. In addition to its natural beauty, three treasures are said to be hidden beneath its blue water.
The first is a gift from the bootleggers for whom Lake Champlain was a major thoroughfare during the Prohibition era of the 1920s and ’30s. Filling small boats with Canadian whiskey, the bootleggers would motor down from Quebec through the Inland Sea, or Northeast Arm, section of the lake, past the Champlain Islands. Larger, faster U.S. patrol boats would often lie in wait. The bootleggers would counter by speeding west toward North Hero Island, lightening their boats by tossing the evidence—the liquor—overboard, and escaping to the Carry, a North Hero portage just a few feet wide that divides the Northeast Arm from the Broad, or main lake, to the west. The bootleggers could lift their smaller boats over the Carry and escape from the feds into the Broad Lake.
Today one can eat lunch in the Birdland restaurant, which abuts the Carry, look out into the Inland Sea, and think of all the liquor on the bottom of the lake, which can be 400 feet deep in spots. So much whiskey. So deep. It brings a tear to the eye.
But that’s not the treasure most tourists and residents seek in Lake Champlain. They’re looking for something nonpotable, 15 to 30 feet in length, with dark skin, a snakelike head, and two horns. What more than 300 people say they have seen is more interesting than bootleg whiskey (though they may have been drinking some)—namely, Champ, the Lake Champlain monster.
Joseph Zarzynski, a seventh-grade American history teacher in Saratoga Springs, New York, and an amateur shipwreck hunter, is the expert on Champ. The author of Champ: Beyond the Legend, he searched for the monster for about 20 years, until the mid-1990s, doing what he calls his best work in 1987 and 1988, when he sought Champ with side-scan sonar and an underwater robot.
