Cadborosaurus in the Comox Valley: Caddy Sightings, K'ómoks Legend, and the Caddy Gift Shop

Cadborosaurus is a sea serpent from the folklore of the Pacific Northwest coast, reported from Alaska down to San Francisco Bay but centred on the waters around Vancouver Island and the Salish Sea. Witness descriptions are remarkably consistent across decades: a long serpentine body showing vertical humps or coils at the surface, a head often compared to a horse or camel, a long flexible neck, front flippers, and a fan- or fluke-like tail. Reported lengths run from about 5 metres for claimed juveniles up to 15–20 metres or more for adults, and its swimming motion is described as an up-and-down undulation — unlike the side-to-side motion of fish and sharks.

The name arrived in 1933, when a wave of sightings near Cadboro Bay outside Victoria made front-page news. Major H.W. Langley, clerk of the BC Legislature, and F.W. Kemp of the provincial archives were among the first credible witnesses of the modern era, and Victoria Daily Times editor Archie Wills coined "Cadborosaurus" — the lizard of Cadboro Bay — with the friendlier nickname "Caddy" following close behind. Coastal fishermen had suggested naming it "Old Hiaschuckaluck" after existing First Nations tradition, a reminder that the creature was already ancient news to the people of this coast.

The story took its strangest turn in 1937, when whalers at the Naden Harbour station in Haida Gwaii pulled a carcass roughly 3 to 3.8 metres long from the stomach of a sperm whale — camel-like head, serpentine body, fin-like appendages. It was photographed, described, sampled, and then lost. The BC Provincial Museum's director tentatively called the sample a fetal baleen whale, but the photographs kept the debate alive for decades. In 1995, oceanographer Dr. Paul LeBlond of UBC and zoologist Dr. Edward Bousfield went as far as formally proposing a new species, Cadborosaurus willsi, in a published paper — an almost unheard-of step for a cryptid, and one that keeps Caddy in a different category from most campfire monsters.

Most Caddy coverage fixates on Victoria and Cadboro Bay, 200 kilometres to the south. But the historical record puts the creature — or at least the belief in it — right on the Comox Valley's doorstep, and the local connection actually runs deeper than the 1933 newspaper craze.

Numkse Lee Kwala: The K'ómoks Name

The strongest Comox Valley link is also the oldest. The K'ómoks First Nation of Vancouver Island has its own traditional name for the Caddy-like sea being: numkse lee kwala. It sits alongside hiyitl'iik of the Manhousat people on Sidney Inlet and t'chain-ko in Sechelt tradition — independent names, in different languages, for a serpentine creature of these same waters, long predating any settler newspaper. Researchers caution that lumping diverse First Nations traditions into a single "Cadborosaurus" category flattens their distinct origins and meanings, and that's fair — but the fact remains that the people of the Comox Valley had a name for something in this water centuries before Archie Wills needed a headline.

1933: The Oyster River Encounter

In the same year Caddy got its name down south, the creature was reportedly seen at the Comox Valley's northern edge. Percy Elsey, who owned a hotel at Oyster River — the community straddling the boundary between the Comox Valley and the Campbell River district — reported a serpent-like creature offshore in 1933 and, in true frontier fashion, fired his rifle at it, apparently wounding it. A later local account described the animal's mid-body rising from the sea "like a huge hump," an estimated five feet in diameter with an orange-coloured belly and tail flukes roughly six feet across. Oyster River residents adopted the serpent as something of a local mascot, and regional histories still list Caddy as the area's most famous citizen.

The Modern Reports: Qualicum Beach 2006 and Campbell River 2025

Sightings near the valley didn't stop in the black-and-white era. In November 2006, a report at Qualicum Beach — about 40 minutes south of Courtenay — described the animal raising its tail out of the water, exposing a rear appendage witnesses compared to the one visible in the 1937 Naden Harbour carcass photos. And as recently as July 2025, a sighting was reported near Campbell River, where two teenagers on a dock described a serpentine animal in the Salish Sea — one of the reports that has kept the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club actively collecting eyewitness accounts from coastal residents into the 2020s. In September 2025, Coast Salish elders publicly connected contemporary reports of sea anomalies to their traditional accounts of serpentine beings, bridging the oldest and newest chapters of the story.

There's a satisfying footnote for skeptics and believers alike: the Comox Valley is home to a confirmed ancient sea monster. The Puntledge River elasmosaur, an 80-million-year-old long-necked marine reptile discovered near Courtenay and now displayed at the Courtenay and District Museum and Palaeontology Centre, was named British Columbia's official provincial fossil. A real long-necked sea reptile genuinely did patrol these waters — just 80 million years earlier than Caddy witnesses would prefer.

Drawn from newspaper archives, the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club's records, and the LeBlond–Bousfield research, here are the landmark entries in the Caddy file. Rows closest to the Comox Valley are highlighted.

Across roughly 300 claimed sightings in 200 years, the pattern that emerges is geographic as much as zoological: Caddy is reported in inlets, bays, and river mouths — exactly where herring runs and sea lions concentrate, and exactly where people happen to be looking. Whether that pattern describes an unknown animal's feeding habits or a very human one is the whole debate.

Every great cryptid deserves a gift shop. Loch Ness has an entire visitor economy; Sasquatch sells coffee mugs from Harrison Hot Springs to Willow Creek. Caddy — with a better sightings record than most and 90 years of name recognition — has somehow never gotten its own till. So, in the same spirit as the rest of the Strategic Crypto Reserve parody universe, we built one. Sort of.

Inside the shop: plush Caddys with anatomically-debated tail flukes, "I Got Humped in the Salish Sea" t-shirts, replica Naden Harbour carcass photos, Percy Elsey commemorative earplugs, and a wall of blurry photographs sold as-is. Outside the imaginary shop: the real gift, which is that all of this lore is free, local, and genuinely fascinating — and the closest thing to actual Caddy merchandise from this project will arrive the way everything else here does: as a clearly-labelled parody NFT drop.

When a Caddy collection launches, it will follow the same rules as every collection in the ecosystem: minted on Polygon, disclosed as entertainment, and sold as digital art with no investment expectation of any kind — see our existing collections and how to buy an NFT for how that works. Until then, the Comox Valley's real Caddy attractions are the water itself, the Courtenay and District Museum's genuine elasmosaur, and a pair of binoculars pointed at the Salish Sea.