Scary Monsters and Super Creeps

I woke up in my bed in my house in the Cotswolds. It should have just been another normal day – but it wasn’t. Today was my first day of being a monster-hunter. I woke up the kids and kissed them goodbye in a slightly formal manner, like some Victorian explorer off to deepest, darkest Africa for three years.

‘It’s a lake monster in Canada . . . Sort of like a dinosaur-type thing . . .’ I didn’t sound very clear on the matter.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ I replied in a manner intended to convey that danger was not really something that bothered me.

‘Well . . . Yes, actually, it is . . . But anyway . . . Bye . . .’ I wandered downstairs feeling slightly deflated and made myself a very strong coffee from the Nespresso machine that has turned my wife Stacey and me into caffeine junkies. We have terrible cold-turkey days when we run out of the little coffee capsules and hang around looking out of the window, waiting for the man. (The Nespresso man, who’ll deliver our next box of coffee crack.) I sipped my perfectly frothed macchiato and started to worry a little. For someone who was off monster-hunting I felt distinctly spoilt and unprepared. Should I have gone to Millets? What did a monster-hunter need? A knife would have been good but I was flying to Canada so it wouldn’t be allowed on the plane. What about a long stick? They probably wouldn’t let that on board either. What did a monster-hunter wear? I quite fancied having some sort of uniform – something a touch Indiana-Jones-ish – but I’d just packed my usual Carhartt gear, the uniform of the overgrown London media wanker who refuses to grow old gracefully. Someone on Twitter once said that they thought men like me dress in the same manner as we did at our sexual peak. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a sexual peak but I knew what she was saying.

It was exciting: this was the first of six trips around the world in pursuit of six legendary creatures. I had decided to go to British Columbia first. It was probably the most civilized of all my destinations and I still wasn’t entirely sure what the form was for monster-hunting. I was looking at this trip as a bit of a trainer mission before I hit the more difficult ones.

My destination was the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia – a popular summer-vacation destination for West Coast Canadians. Lake Okanagan, an eighty-mile-long glacial lake that runs the length of the whole valley, is supposedly the home of Ogopogo: a monster that has been chronicled and talked about for more than 200 years. Ogopogo is pretty big news in Canada – every bit as famous as Nessie.

I said goodbye to Stacey in the manner of a hunter-gatherer off to collect meat for the family: I hit her over the head with a large club and had my way with her. Actually no, I didn’t. I kissed her and told her I’d be back in two weeks . . .

At Heathrow I readied myself to face the worst part of any journey: airport security. Obviously I don’t want to be blown out of the sky but you can’t help but look at the ‘security specialists’ screening you in international airports and immediately think, Failed traffic wardens.

I’d tried to think ahead and had bought a couple of see-thru washbags so that I didn’t have to put all my liquids into the see-thru bags that are always too tight and that BAA now try to sell you for £1 a go. I shouldn’t have bothered. A fourteen-year-old boy with acne and an ill-fitting uniform demanded that I take all the liquids out of my see-thru washbag and put them all into one of their see-thru bags. How this might prevent terrorism was beyond both him and me.

‘We are just here to help you stay safe . . .’ is the repetitive mantra of airport security staff. They’re not, however, there to explain anything. I’d be concerned leaving a sandwich assembly in their hands yet this is the first line of defence against global terrorism. God help us all.

Once I was through the X-ray machine a twelve-year-old Indian woman told me that I could put the liquids back in my own see-thru bag. Again, there was no explanation.

I was then free to set about my preferred, slightly OCD departure routine. First I went to buy Vanity Fair. As usual, I couldn’t find it. As usual, I eventually checked the Women’s Lifestyle section and, sure enough, there it was. It’s not a women’s lifestyle magazine! It’s a fabulously aspirational monthly fix of American snobbery, travel and good journalism. I gave up complaining about this kind of misrepresentation long ago, though. The people manning checkout counters are the younger, idiot brothers of the ‘security specialists’.

I now headed for the ludicrously overpriced seafood bar to have my usual prawn cocktail and half-bottle of house champagne. This has become a ritual. If a meal could be my last on earth then I want it to be good and hang the eye-watering cost.

I was slightly tipsy as I boarded the plane to Vancouver. It wasn’t very full so I ignored my assigned seat number and grabbed one in the front row with loads of legroom. This is always a tense time, waiting for the doors to close and the certainty that the row’s yours. Now, at the very last minute, a bald man bustled on board and plonked himself down right next to me. I suspected that he was doing the same as me, and this wasn’t his assigned seat, but I was in a fairly weak negotiating position. My new neighbour started reading Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin while subtly trying to gain control of our mutual armrest. Unfortunately for him, he had little idea that he was taking on a hardened veteran of elbow wars. For a good twenty minutes or so we jockeyed for position while studiously ‘ignoring’ each other. I could feel his growing hatred of me and realized that this was my first of what I was sure would be many encounters with a super creep.

‘Excuse me – has there been some mistake? Have you paid for two seats?’ I lifted my elbow in mock-exasperation. This caught him totally off-guard. He wasn’t prepared for direct confrontation and backed off fast. His elbow disappeared down by his side and victory was mine. I spread my arm out triumphantly over the whole of the armrest.

He attempted to disguise the defeat by pulling out his laptop (a PC, not a Mac: total confirmation that he was a super creep). I checked out his screensaver. This was a photograph of a red Rolls-Royce parked on a street in Knightsbridge. I hate Rolls-Royces – I just don’t see the point of them. If this vehicle was his he was definitely a super creep. But if he’d just taken a photo of one and then used it as his screensaver he was a sad super creep.

I was flying economy. Not only that but on Air Canada – and their economy is very far from the best. I loathe airline seats. We can put men on the moon but can’t make a comfortable seat for international travel? Let’s get our priorities right. It’s physically impossible to sleep in the weird halfback position that an airline seat forces you into. I’m convinced that they use them in Guantánamo for sleep-deprivation experiments.

I’d scrounged this flight off the Canadian Tourism Commission. Canada suffers from an image problem: people tend to think it’s incredibly boring. Bill Bryson once wrote that publishers went quite pale when he’d announced that he wanted to write something about the place. The Canadian Tourism Commission had high hopes that I was going to change all that . . .

I watched Super 8, a Spielberg homage recommended by Mark Kermode, my all-time favourite movie critic. It was good, but not great. (Curiously given the subject of this book, I’ve never really been that into monster movies. Jaws was good, but that’s about it.) The movie over, I was bored; so I started snooping on my neighbour’s emails. He was Danish and something to with paediatrics. I watched in fasciation as he spent more than an hour perfecting the dullest email I have ever read.

To all area coordinators:

A. Get idea of timelines so that inputs can be planned

B. Get an idea of how inputs should be provided

C. Get a timeline for when inputs should be provided

D. Get provision for extra input on timeline

I checked twice to see if he’d spotted that I was reading his email and was now taking the piss. Surely nobody could write an email that dull without seriously reassessing their life choices? At that moment I was so glad that I was a monster-hunter. My emails would never be like the dull Dane’s. They would be like this:

Dear Tony,

I need that underwater sonic device as soon as you can make it. Were my designs clear enough? Gotta go – I’m picking up some infrared-camera stuff and a really big net and want to get to Millets before it closes.

Dom (Monster-Hunter)

It was just as we started our descent into Vancouver that I realized I’d left my beloved Leica camera at home. This wasn’t the greatest start to my first monster-hunting trip. Now if I did actually see Ogopogo I was going to have to draw the bastard.

The stewardess offered me a glass of Dasani. It appeared nobody had yet told the North Americans that we ran this bottled water out of the country when it was revealed that the contents were simply filtered tap water.

I had to go through Canadian Immigration before catching a little turbo-prop plane to Kelowna. A smiling, friendly official looked at my passport and asked me my reasons for coming to Canada. I couldn’t help myself.

‘I’m here to look for Ogopogo,’ I said, smiling back a little too hard and aware that I might look a bit unstable.

The official’s friendly smile disappeared and was replaced with a world-weary version.

‘Best of luck with that, eh? Now, what is your real reason for visiting Canada?’ She had a hint of steeliness about her.

I smiled again. ‘I’m here to look for Ogopogo . . .’ There was quite a long pause as she sized me up, wondering whether to call security for a cavity search. Then she seemed to remember that she was Canadian and not American.

She stamped my passport and waved me through. I was in. I was in a foreign country hunting monsters. This was turning out to be rather Tintin-esque. Unlike Tintin, however, I have a family – not a loose, shady cabal of homoerotic acquaintances plus a white dog.

Vancouver’s internal departure lounge didn’t have a seafood bar so I had to change my pre-flight order to a doughnut. This made me nervous. The twin-prop was, like most twin-props, rather unsettling to the passenger. On normal planes you can’t really see where the power’s coming from. On a twin prop, like in a helicopter, you spend your whole time staring at the rotors imagining what would happen if they suddenly stopped turning.

An hour into the flight and I got my first view of Lake Okanagan. It’s an ominous-looking thing: a long, dark stretch of water, dwarfed on both sides by steeply rising earth – a physical reminder of the immense glacial forces that once shaped it.

The first time I’d seen this lake was on Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. Here Clarke had investigated the innumerable sightings of a ‘creature’ in the lake. These sightings went way back into the nineteenth century among settlers. The beast was supposed to be not unlike the Loch Ness Monster – there were reports of ‘humps’, long black shapes in the water and stories of a dinosaur-type creature. There were also several intriguing snippets of footage and a multitude of blurred photographs. There was definitely something in this lake that was attracting attention. Legend had it that whatever it was lived in a cave under a place called Rattlesnake Island in the middle of the lake. I decided that this would have to be my first destination.

I picked up my car from Budget. Unlike her UK counterparts, the woman behind the desk was friendly, apparently well-travelled and very helpful. I’m banned from most major car-rental outlets in Central London because I constantly get into altercations with the staff. In the UK the car-rental business seems to be designed to test just how determined you are to rent said vehicles: they’ll do anything they can to prevent you leaving in a rental car. In North America it’s always a joy; they even seem slightly apologetic that you actually have to pay for marching straight out into their car park and driving off in any car with the keys in the ignition.

I’d decided to stay at the south of the lake and work my way up the valley, ending up in the main town of Kelowna. My first bed for the night was in Summerland. I wondered what Summerland was going to be like in October. Not that summery, I imagined. The busy holiday season was long over and the weather was starting to get pretty cold. There was zero boat traffic on the lake, not a single vessel. As I drove south along the lakeshore I realized that I genuinely didn’t have the first clue as to how to monster-hunt. I kept half an eye on the water hoping that maybe I’d get a sighting of Ogopogo immediately but I was intensely aware that this was very unlikely.

I turned on the local talk-radio station – always the best way to get under the skin of a community when in North America. The big news story of the day was about a man who had repelled an intruder to his trailer by using a screwdriver and ‘bear spray’. I wondered what was in bear spray. It definitely sounded like something a monster-hunter should have in his backpack.

I kept driving and put the Kermode/Mayo movie podcast on. This has been my constant companion on so many road trips, my little slice of normality in weird surroundings. A wind had picked up and the lake was choppy and rather mean-looking. Okanagan reminded me a lot of Loch Ness. It’s on roughly the same latitude and is the same sort of shape, although a lot bigger. If I’m honest, lakes have always creeped me out a bit. There’s something rather ominous about their stillness and murky depths. I don’t like swimming in them.

In Summerland I checked into my hotel, a rather posh beach resort that was totally deserted. Summer had indeed left Summerland, seemingly taking all the inhabitants with it.

This was the limbo season – after the summer hordes but before the ski season started in nearby resorts like Big White. I wandered the empty Shining-like corridors until I got to my room. This was satisfyingly huge. As the only resident in the hotel I’d been given a suite overlooking the lake. Just below my balcony, on the lakeshore, was a hot tub. Now this was my kind of monster-hunting. I was tired from the long day travelling and slipped off my smeggy clothes and hopped into the tub. I lay back and sighed. This was the life, lounging in a hot tub while keeping half an eye on the lake for monster action . . .

I must have dozed off because I awoke with someone shaking me and shouting, ‘Sir! Sir, are you OK?’

It was a security guard, probably freaked out enough to see a guest let alone a naked one passed out in the hot tub. Or maybe he just thought I was a trespasser. I tried to look authoritative but I’d been dribbling down my face and the whole thing was not a good look. I retreated to my room with as much dignity as I could muster and fell asleep. I slept like a log and woke up twelve hours later feeling a whole lot better about things. The weather had turned and it was a beautiful autumn day. I spent a cursory ten minutes staring out at the water looking for monsters until hunger took over.

I drove into Summerland proper but there wasn’t anything there so I headed down to Penticton, a larger town right at the southern end of the lake. This too was like a ghost town. My spirits dropped. I rather hoped that Ogopogo hadn’t also left the area for the winter.

I wandered the empty streets before opting for a place called Fibonacci on Main Street where the coffee smelt good. It tasted good as well: I had a monster latte as I surfed the Net for information about Ogopogo and Penticton. There’d been a famous sighting here back in 1941. A bunch of kids swimming off the beach saw a huge, thirty-foot-long object that looked like a snake. It was swimming just beyond the wooden-log buoys about fifty feet offshore. They all ran to get an adult but the thing was gone when they got back.

I rang the local Ogopogo expert, Arlene Gaal. She’d been on the original Arthur C. Clarke programme and had written a couple of books on Ogopogo so I hoped that she could maybe point out areas of the lake where there had been more sightings than elsewhere. I had a quick chat with her and we agreed to meet on Saturday, the day after tomorrow, at her home in Kelowna.

With no plans for the day, I decided to explore Penticton. This took about five minutes. It was like the beginning of 28 Days Later.

I wandered down to the beach where the kids had seen Ogopogo. A man in blue overalls was at the top of a ladder, putting a fresh coat of vivid-orange paint on an enormous metal peach. The peach was about twenty feet tall and looked quite cool. The Okanagan Valley has a very curious weather system. The areas to the north end of the valley get more rain and record far colder temperatures than the areas to the south, which are almost desert-like. For years the area’s main agricultural business was fruit production – hence the big metal peach. Recently, however, locals have realized that the climate’s perfect for wine production and this has become a boom industry, superseding the fruit business.

On the shore was a sign warning bathers of potential hazards: ‘Check depth. Check weather forecast. Don’t trust inflatable devices . . .’ and, my personal favourite: ‘Learn to swim.’

There was no mention of Ogopogo danger. Indeed, so far I hadn’t come across much mention of the creature anywhere. I think I’d expected the whole area to be teeming with Ogopogo stuff and paraphernalia. I’d thought it would be the big thing around there, like Nessie is at Loch Ness. Okanagans, however, appeared to be pretty uninterested in their local monster.

I spent a futile five minutes staring at the lake hoping that Ogopogo would show up. I then wandered along the shoreline past a gargantuan old steamboat, beached like a dead whale. Before the arrival of the bridge that now spans the lake at Kelowna, vessels like these were incredibly popular with both day-trippers and locals as a means to get round the lake. In 1926, seven years before the first recorded Nessie sightings (archival records of Ogopogo sightings go back to 1872) the British Columbian government announced the commencement of a ferry service between Kelowna and Westbank. They also declared that the vessel would be equipped with ‘devices designed to repel attacks from Ogopogo’.

I checked the beached steamship for signs of any such devices but could see none. I imagined some guy perched on the prow of the ship atop a terrifying harpoon scanning the dirty grey waters for monsters. I walked round a corner and finally came across my first sighting of Ogopogo – sadly this was only in the form of a badly painted depiction on a sign advertising the Ogopogo Motel.

I wandered into the reception only to be accosted by a large lady at least as scary as the legendary beast itself. She looked at me suspiciously and asked me what I wanted. Slightly caught off-guard and embarrassed, I didn’t identify myself as one of the world’s foremost monster-hunters. Instead, I found myself telling her that I needed a room.

‘A room?’ she barked in surprise, as though I’d just asked her to bare her breasts.

My pointless web of deceit started to unravel. ‘A week – I’m in town for a . . . convention.’

She looked at me suspiciously. ‘A convention? What convention? There ain’t no convention in town.’

I replied that it was the ‘ZGB Inc.’ convention, hoping to confuse her with the initials.

Clearly you had to be very much on the ball if you wanted a room at the Ogopogo Motel. I imagined that guests were as frequent as sightings of the creature itself.

I wanted to leave, just run out of the door screaming, but instead I continued my fantasy.

‘Because I’m a . . . recovering addict and can’t be near a casino or . . . I go mental.’

She looked at me funny. There was a long silence. Finally she announced that the motel was ‘completely full’ as all the ‘orchard workers’ were there. I felt like a relieved blond trucker who’d just been turned away from the Bates Motel because there was no room.

I walked quickly back to the safety of my car. The weather had turned and ominous black clouds hung low over the lake. I drove to Summerland in driving rain.

It was eleven in the morning when I got back into my lakeside suite. The rain had stopped and the lake was flat calm, like a mirror. It was seven in the evening back home in the UK so I thought I’d Skype them. By means of the kind of modern technology that Tintin would never have been able to enjoy even if he’d had a family I was soon looking at my sitting room back in the Cotswolds. Stacey started telling me a long story about something that happened to the kids at school but I wasn’t listening. My attention had been drawn to some weird movement in the lake about 100 yards away from my window. Two shapes, like twin heads, were making very fast figure-of-eight motions in the water.

‘Are you listening?’ said Stacey, but I ignored her and jumped up, grabbed my iPhone and rushed to the window to start filming. In the background Stacey was still talking to me but couldn’t see where I’d gone. With my iPhone rolling I shouted at the laptop to tell them what was going on. I backed away from the window a touch and turned the computer round so that they could see what I was seeing. The zoom on the iPhone wasn’t great but I could see close enough to know that whatever was making the disturbance was not a bird. It looked like a pair of three-foot bumps sticking out of the water and whatever it was was thrashing about, as though feeding or chasing something. I couldn’t quite believe it and Stacey was sure that I was joking. Below my suite, to the left of the hot tub, was a dock that stuck out very near to the disturbance. I shouted to Stacey that I was going to run down to the end to try to get some closer footage. By the time I’d got there, though, whatever it was had disappeared. But it had disappeared underwater: nothing flew up or swam away in sight.

This genuinely was a puzzling moment. As I walked back along the dock I spotted the same security man who’d found me asleep in the hot tub the day before. He’d obviously seen me screaming and running down the dock and probably assumed that I was about to do weird naked shit again. As I walked past him he nodded at me hesitantly.

I told him about what I’d seen and showed him the iPhone footage. He looked at it for quite a while and then asked to see it again.

When it finished he looked at me seriously and said, ‘Looks like you’ve just had your first sighting of Ogopogo . . .’ He had no idea that I was the world’s most famous monster-hunter or that I was looking for the very creature he was now saying I’d captured on film. I couldn’t believe it. Had I really got a bona fide sighting, on film, of a monster on my very first full day of monster-hunting? Surely it couldn’t be that easy? I walked back to my room and immediately posted the footage on my Facebook page. I’d just told everyone that I was off on this trip and now I was posting a sighting. Nobody was going to believe me but I swear this is exactly what happened.

Rather adrenalized by events, I drove up to Kelowna to find the main bookstore and buy Arlene Gaal’s book In Search of Ogopogo. I wanted to do a bit of flattery research before meeting her. As I looked for it in the store I couldn’t get my Ogopogo sighting out of my mind. I’d set off to find a monster and had an ‘encounter’ on my very first day. I was slightly buzzing but also worried that nobody would believe me. I wondered if this was what happened to other people who spotted things in the water but were worried about public ridicule.

I found the book with some difficulty and the woman behind the counter seemed surprised to be selling it. I kept the news of my sighting to myself. It was now very sunny again. I had never been anywhere where the weather changed so rapidly. I headed for the waterside park to read on a bench. There, to my delight, I spotted a statue of Ogopogo. It was green and white with humps rising in and out of the concrete ending in a slightly dopey-looking horned head with a big red tongue flapping around. It rather reminded me of Puff the Magic Dragon. I sat on a bench right beside it and started reading the book in between watching Japanese tourists drape themselves all over Puff for hour-long photo sessions. I so admire the Japanese race’s dedication to having their photos taken while striking curious fictional ‘gangsta-san’ poses. They will think nothing of taking more than 500 photographs of a woman in an oversized sun visor giving the camera the peace sign while gurning. It must have been the sheer amount of holiday footage needing to be developed in Japan that turned their inventors towards thinking about a digital camera.

I found the Gaal book quite a difficult read. She was not the most gifted of writers and it became more of a long list of sightings. A great part of the text seemed to comprise the numbers of TV crews she’d worked with. After a while I became a little bored and nodded off on the sun-drenched bench.

On Friday I got up at the crack of dawn as I was still on UK time. I headed off into Penticton again. I wasn’t quite sure how this was possible but, if anything, it was even more deserted. Back at Fibonacci I had the strongest coffee of my life so far. I’d sent an email to a man who’d promised that he could rent me a boat even though the season was over. We’d arranged to meet behind the waterfront casino at half past nine. The weather had turned again and it was unbelievably cold and very overcast. The lake looked choppy and rather foreboding.

I hadn’t really brought any warm boating clothes with me. I looked around but there was only one clothes shop open, and that was in the foyer of the casino. I was surprised that the place was already open. It turned out to be the busiest place in Penticton, with about seven sad-looking individuals sitting lifelessly in front of one-arm bandits robotically feeding the voracious machine with quarters. If there is anything more depressing than a casino at nine in the morning then I haven’t yet come across it.

I bought the only warm thing available: a short-sleeved fleece with the words ‘Canadian Lover Man’ embossed in big red letters on the back. I was sartorially mortified but had very little choice. Even the shop assistant looked at me in a weird way.

My boat guy was all sensibly wrapped up against the cold. He didn’t say anything about my outfit but you could feel a touch of slight tension once he’d spotted it. Fortunately, because of my regular summer vacationing in Ontario, I have a Canadian Pleasure-Craft Licence; this seemed to relax him a touch. We started going over what I needed to know about the boat and he asked me where I was intending to go. I told him that I was headed north, towards Peachland. I didn’t mention Rattlesnake Island. I’d been told that locals were rather superstitious about the place and didn’t like people going there. This guy didn’t seem to be concerned about anything but payment.

I gave him my damage deposit and asked him, ‘What happens if I hit Ogopogo and sink the boat?’

‘Then you won’t be getting this deposit back,’ he said without hesitation.

‘But if Ogopogo attacks me then it’s not my fault . . . Do you have a special clause for that?’

He looked at me as though I was a lunatic and I didn’t want to push the issue as I wanted to get on the boat. I bade him farewell and put-putted out of the marina.

The lake was rough – very rough – and my little boat and I started to be tossed about quite violently. I looked around. Mine was the only boat on the whole lake. Was this a wise thing to be doing? I looked up at the steep sides of the valley that towered high up above the dark water and I felt very, very tiny in my little vessel. I gunned the engine and the boat speeded up, bumping fast across endless advancing walls of enemy waves.

About ten minutes in and the lake got even rougher. Huge waves battered the front of the boat and I was forced to slow right down. The clouds above me darkened and the boat started to be chucked about like a piece of driftwood. I suddenly got nervous. What was I doing here? There was nobody about to help me if I got tipped over, and the water was ice-cold. It would definitely get me before Ogopogo did.

I remembered a story that I’d read in Arlene Gaal’s book, about the local Indian tribe. They would always take a small animal out with them in a canoe so that, should the monster they called the N’ha-a-itk whip up a storm, they could throw the poor thing overboard as an appeasing sacrifice. I’d brought nothing with me, not even a sandwich. There’d been a McDonald’s on the edge of Penticton: maybe I could have could have sacrificed some chicken nuggets. (The added problem here being that I’m not convinced those are actually made from real birds.)

To my right, the landscape looked rather nightmarish. Back in 2003 a huge fire laid waste to the forest. Now the stark grey rock is littered with the burnt skeletons of dead trees. It was crazy but I was starting to get very spooked. I put the radio on to try and calm myself down a bit but I couldn’t get anything except white noise that only increased my self-imposed paranoia. The lake was crazy rough now and I tried to hug the barren, burnt shoreline to get some calmer water. The cliffs loomed over me like predatory giants and I got really freaked out by a weird noise. It sounded like howling – evil howling. Then I realized that it was just one of the ropes holding my canopy. It had snapped at the attachment and was now juddering in the wind and making an odd sound – odd, but not howling and certainly not evil. I looked down into the water: my depth finder told me that it was 600 feet deep. I tried to man up and carried on rounding Squally Point, where the lake turned right. As I did so, I spotted my goal: Rattlesnake Island was dead ahead.

I approached it gingerly. It was ridiculous but I was actually quite scared. My heart was racing and my mouth had gone completely dry. Obviously my own sighting yesterday wasn’t helping. I got close and cut the engine. The waves had abated a little and I took a good look at the island. This appeared to be a barren piece of terrain, no more than a rock, really, with a lone scraggly tree clinging to it. There were no signs of either rattlesnakes or Ogopogo. I pulled out my iPhone and started filming. This was mainly so I could speak and break the silence that was starting to become a little oppressive.

Ogopogo is (or are) rumoured to live in a cave that leads into a series of tunnels starting just below the island. Sonar scans have shown a large hole down there. Ogopogo enthusiasts claim that this is why no bodies of these creatures are ever found: because they retreat inside to die. I say ‘creatures’ because there would have to be several. For something to exist for so long in this lake it would have to breed, start a family, get a mortgage . . .

I kept filming and started shouting, ‘Hello, Ogopogo!’ at the top of my voice. I had now clearly lost my mind. I gunned the motor and decided to try to navigate the very narrow channel between the island and the black, burnt mainland. This was a really stupid thing to do, as I had no charts on board and the depth finder would tell me about jutting rocks only when it was too late. I went for it anyway and an invisible current immediately caught the vessel and powered me through. I held my breath. I really didn’t want to hit anything. The idea of having to get into the dark, cold water beneath me was not pleasant. I was immensely relieved when I got through and was back in safe waters. I felt like I was in some weird episode of Scooby Doo. I laughed out loud but it sounded a little hollow on my own. I suddenly longed for human company and started to head back to Penticton. As I rounded Squally Point the lake suddenly calmed itself. I zoomed away fast from Rattlesnake Island and kept to the western shoreline on the way back, which is populated and felt safer than the barren eastern shore. Finally I spotted the two tall buildings behind the casino on Penticton Beach and breathed a sigh of relief. I had survived my first ill-prepared expedition on Lake Okanagan. I tied the boat to the dock and called the boat guy on his mobile. He was down to meet me about fifteen minutes later. We had a little chat as he checked the boat for damage. He told me about the divers who worked on the new bridge that replaced the old floating one between West Kelowna and Kelowna itself.

‘A lot of them quit. They said it was scary and that there were some seriously big things swimming around down there. Some say it’s a sturgeon but nobody has ever caught one. The visibility is limited but these guys are not spooked easily. At least three I knew quit as they were so freaked out.’

I nodded and laughed as though they were weak idiots. I didn’t tell him about just how freaked out I’d been about an hour ago just floating on top of the water. The idea of getting under the dark water (and I love scuba diving) was pretty unthinkable to me.

I said my goodbyes and got in the car. As I drove my phone rang. It was the aunt of an acquaintance back in London who had grown up in the Okanagan. I’d emailed her saying I couldn’t find a boat to rent and she’d contacted her family. Now they were offering to take me to Rattlesnake Island on their family boat. I was too embarrassed to tell them I’d found a rental guy and had just been. So I agreed to meet them at Peachland marina at three-thirty that afternoon – I was going back out there . . .

Peachland is a pretty little community right on the lake directly opposite Rattlesnake Island. There are actually two marinas, one rather grandly calling itself a ‘yacht club’ and the other seemingly a little less exclusive. I parked my car and sat waiting. At almost exactly three-thirty I saw an old speedboat with two men in it zoom towards the locked marina. Since there were no other boats on the lake I presumed these had to be my guys. I peered at them through the fence and one shouted, ‘You from London?’ I nodded and they told me to come down. I indicated that I couldn’t and so they told me to walk down the road towards the beach where they’d pick me up.

As I clambered aboard the old speedboat I noticed it was covered from front to back in weird blue carpeting. Sort of the nautical equivalent of the avocado bathroom set. The guys introduced themselves: Al and Kevin. They were both in their mid-fifties and very friendly. Al had been born in the valley and Kevin had moved there in 1985.

They had absolutely no idea why I was in the Okanagan. Al had received an email from London asking if they could help me out, so here they were. I filled them in on my mission and they both started laughing – in a good way.

Another dramatic change in the weather meant it was now a beautiful sunny day. The sun glinted off the water and the lake was almost enticing.

‘No, but I’ve seen the Sasquatch. Me and my son saw one on a hunting trip only an hour and a half from here.’ Kevin looked serious for a second. I asked him what the Bigfoot looked like.

‘He looked like a big drunken Irishman – about eight feet tall, covered in red hair with a fast lolloping walk. He just stared right at us for a good twenty seconds and then made off into the trees . . .’ This was promising: I felt these guys wouldn’t think I was mad.

I asked them about Ogopogo again. Did they know anybody who had seen anything? They’d both seen big wakes in the lake but not ‘the humps’ – though both of them knew people who had. Kevin started talking again.

‘Anyone local believes in Ogopogo. It’s the fucking Albertans coming here who all poo-poo it. The thing is, nobody’s scared of Ogopogo. It’s not a monster; monsters kill people. It’s a creature, a USO [unidentified swimming object], but not a monster.’

I nodded and looked at the fast-approaching Rattlesnake Island. It was unbelievable. In the bright sunlight it looked like a totally different place. The water lapping around it was crystal blue and sparkling. It was lovely. We motored around it, just as I had that morning.

We beached the boat in a perfect little harbour hidden behind two protruding rocks. I hadn’t noticed it earlier. We hopped off the boat and clambered up the steep slope towards the island’s summit. As we climbed I spotted the remains of something man-made. It almost looked like an overgrown crazy-golf course. It couldn’t be, of course. This was the forbidden place, the sacred home of the monster. How could there be a crazy-golf course here? We got to the top of the island and Al was standing on a big stone pedestal. This was clearly man-made. I asked him what it was.

‘It was the pyramid,’ replied Al. ‘Eddy Haymour’s pyramid . . .’ He was smiling at me.

‘Sorry, I’m being thick, but I don’t understand what you mean. Who’s Eddy Haymour and why are there the remains of a pyramid and a crazy-golf course here?’

It turned out that back in the early 1970s a Lebanese man, Eddy Haymour, moved to the Okanagan Valley. He had emigrated to Canada and had done rather well setting up a chain of barber shops in Edmonton. He’d caused quite a stir, however, in the white-bread Okanagan community because he was, to say the least, quite a character. After a little while living in the valley Eddy noticed Rattlesnake Island and decided to buy it and turn it into a Middle Eastern theme park. Al started to tell me about the things that Eddy had either planned or actually built for the park and I just didn’t believe him. He suggested that I try to find a copy of Eddy Haymour’s life story, From Nut House to Castle.

I later managed to get a copy from a second-hand bookstore in town. Here is Eddy’s description of what he wanted for the island:

On the four-point-five acre island would be great landscaping with beautiful gardens. There was to be a forty-six-feet long, twenty-six-feet high concrete structure in the form of a camel with a hollow stomach where thirty-nine flavors of ice cream would be served. You could peek out of the windows of the camel’s eyes, music would come from his mouth and the garbage from his tail. The washroom would be in the legs. All the cultures of the Middle East would be represented; India by a miniature Taj Mahal; Kuwait by fountains; minarets would depict Saudi Arabia; and there would be a large pyramid for Egypt. In a huge tent Middle Eastern films and other entertainment would be presented. Kids could go around the island on ponies led by Arab storytellers, or in a chariot pulled by a white horse. There would be a toddlers swimming pool with babysitters and lifeguards. I figured I needed something familiar to Canadians so I designed a unique miniature golf course, all landscaped and each hole relating to an Arab landmark. I wanted to have a small submarine to take kids down to the underwater cave, home of Ogopogo . . .

Al laughed and said that the story got even weirder. The theme park did half open – for one day. The pyramid and the camel and various other bits were built, and locals came over for the grand opening, but the local British Columbian government then stepped in and closed Eddy’s island down. He had clearly rubbed some important local people up the wrong way. They tried to change the zoning for the island, refused him ferry permits to take people over there and then challenged his plans for sanitation facilities. Eddy was left with a lot of debts and no way to pay them off as it became clear that officialdom was never going to let him open the island properly. Things spiralled out of control. Eddy’s wife left him and then the government inserted an agent provocateur to make friends with Eddy and get him to make threats against the government. Eddy was thrown into a nut house and the government forced him to sell them back the island at a tiny percentage of its actual value.

I couldn’t believe this kind of thing went on in straight-laced, well-behaved Canada.

It was eventually agreed that Eddy Haymour would be released if he left Canada. He went back to Lebanon where, clearly, his resentment at the way he had been treated by the country he’d been so proud to make his home – and become a citizen of – boiled over. Lebanon was just starting the slide into civil war and there were armed factions all over the country. Eddy got together a couple of his cousins and forcibly took over the Canadian Embassy in Beirut, holding thirty hostages for three days. Following slightly panicky negotiations, Eddy released the hostages and, unbelievably, was allowed back into Canada, where he spent ten years fighting his case through the courts. He eventually won; Eddy was awarded damages and it was admitted that the government had behaved appallingly towards him. Eddy never got Rattlesnake Island back, though. He built a ‘castle’ on the shore opposite the island, which he turned into a hotel. However, he never forgot his island and eventually had a thirty-foot statue of himself built and placed outside his castle pointing at it.

I longed to know what had happened to Eddy’s statue when he died but neither Al nor Kevin knew its whereabouts.

Back on the boat we cruised around Rattlesnake Island again and checked Squally Point. This was the place where the local Indians claimed Ogopogo was most often sighted. We saw nothing.

Later Kevin and Al dropped me off at the little beach. Back at my hotel I sat on my balcony with a bottle of Sumac Ridge and stared at the lake. I gave up when the bottle was empty and it started to get dark.

The following morning I checked out and drove to the big city: Kelowna. My appointment with Arlene Gaal was at two-thirty that afternoon. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but she definitely believed in the beast and was sure to have something to say.

With the morning to kill in Kelowna, I decided to wander around and get my bearings. I ambled down the main street and ended up at the lakeside park where the statue of Ogopogo was. On an adjacent patch of grass, facing a raised concrete step, was gathered a small crowd of people I don’t think it would be unfair to describe as shabby. They were all listening to a black man wearing a long leather trenchcoat and dirty dreadlocks who was shouting into a microphone. Intrigued, I approached the scene. Several people were carrying placards. One of these read, ‘Marx said there’d be days like this’; another said, ‘Decolonize the valley’.

For some reason it really irritated me that the word ‘valley’ was misspelt. I wandered up to the man in a gasmask who was carrying it and pointed to the sign.

‘“Valley” . . . You’ve spelt it with three ls and it should be just two.’

About twenty yards away was another gentleman in a gasmask. His sign read, ‘Capitalism – stop that sh*t’. However angry he was, the Canadian in him had forced him to asterisk the i in shit.

I listened to the speeches for a while. It was only after about ten minutes that I worked out what this was all about. It was an Occupy Kelowna demonstration, taking its lead from the Occupy Wall Street demos in New York that were being reproduced all over the world. There seemed to be a general dislike of plutocracy, the rich, CEOs, bankers . . . Basically the usual suspects.

Some guy stood up to talk about some new miracle energy that could power his home. Another guy got up and started going on about the postal service and how they should all go on strike. Thankfully the stench of patchouli oil in the air was thick enough to mask the omnipresent BO.

‘Guys, anybody who wants to speak – anybody – please don’t be shy, just get up here and say your piece. This is what it’s all about.’

Nobody moved and I couldn’t resist. I found myself walking past a huge earth mother who was clutching a Mega Slushy as though her firstborn. I got up on the stage and grabbed the microphone. I raised my right fist and shouted: ‘Greetings, comrades . . . !’ Everyone shouted greetings back. This was fun.

This isn’t exactly my bag . . .’ (I tried to sound like someone at Woodstock and was briefly tempted to warn the motley assembly that there was some bad acid going round.)

‘I’m over here from the UK to look for Ogopogo and . . . I was wondering what you guys thought? Anybody here seen the monster? Can I see by a show of hands who thinks he exists?’

The crowd turned in a second. They started booing and one guy shouted, ‘Fuck off, you stupid asshole!’ It seemed that asterisks applied only to written profanities. A small Asian postal worker grabbed the mike and told me to get lost . . .

I left the stage and felt the disapproving stares of everyone around me. I even got half shoulder-barged by a man holding a sign saying, ‘Eat the rich’. I decided to move on.

After walking around town for a while I had lunch in a Japanese restaurant opposite the demo so that I could people watch from safety. A woman in a Beatles cap was now on stage playing a guitar and screeching loudly. Her song seemed interminable and even the protestors seemed relieved when it was over. She, however, was nothing compared to the man in wheelchair who followed. He couldn’t get up on the stage so the Rasta brought him the microphone and then told everyone to gather closer so that they could all see him. There were about 200 draft dodgers littered around the park. I reckoned if the police swooped now they could end crime in the valley in one go.

The wheelchair man was a very spiritual fellow. Rarely had I heard more bollocks spoken. He urged the surrounding crusties to close their eyes and imagine themselves to be in a happy place. Then he started chanting some mantra in cod Tibetan. It was embarrassing. To try to drown him out I asked my Japanese waitress whether she had heard of the Hibagon. Sadly, her English wasn’t that great and she thought I was ordering something off the menu. It all became quite confusing.

After lunch I drove north, away from the lake and towards the mountains where, so my sat-nav promised me, Arlene Gaal lived. As I drove further and further inland it dawned on me that I’d rather expected her to be on the lakeshore with cameras trained on the waters. When I eventually got to her place I realized you couldn’t even see the lake from there.

She greeted me at the door to her home, a little white puppy yapping at her feet. She was a sweet little old lady and had set up a table on which loads of photos were laid out. Some of the snaps were from strangers who’d sent them to her; others were ones she’d taken. She had become a focus for Ogopogo sightings. People who didn’t know what to do with them were always directed to her. I really wanted to tell her about my sighting but thought I should be polite and wait a bit. I looked through the photos. A lot of them could easily have been freak big waves on a calm lake but there were several that were not so explainable. To me what was convincing was the sheer number of unexplained sightings, especially by people who did not want their names released for fear of ridicule. I’d assumed most people would be publicity seekers using the opportunity to get on the television. Far from it: Arlene said a lot of people were very reticent to discuss their sightings because they didn’t want to be laughed at.

This was my first meeting with a cryptozoologist and she didn’t seem that strange – but I noticed that whenever we talked about Ogopogo a steely determination appeared in her eyes. The ‘Folden film’ in 1968 had been what started it all for her. Sawmill worker Art Folden was driving along the lake-shore when he noticed something strange in the water. He pointed it out to his wife and they stopped the car and Art got out his 8mm cine camera and started filming. The object was diving in and out of the water so Folden, being aware that he didn’t have much film, started to shoot every time the thing reappeared. Eventually it swam away from its initial position quite near the shore and disappeared into the deeper waters in the middle of the lake. According to Arlene this was still the best footage ever taken. She said that on the lakeshore road just near where Folden took his footage there used to be an official sign that read:

OGOPOGO’S HOME

Before the unimaginative, practical, white man came the fearsome lake monster n’aavit was well known to the primitive, superstitious Indian. His home was believed to be a cave at Squally Point and small animals were carried in their canoes to appease the serpent.

Ogopogo is still seen each year – but now by white men.

It seemed quite a patronizing sign and the government who originally put it up clearly felt the same, as it had now been removed.

I told her that I’d assumed the locals would have really used the Ogopogo story to attract tourists, but there was almost nothing visible in the valley except for the statue in the port.

She said that she loathed the statue because it was ‘stupid and Disneyesque’.

I told her what hotel I was staying at and she said that there had been a great sighting from there. She advised me to sit on my balcony and watch the lake. If it hadn’t been for my sighting the other morning using this ‘method’ I might have been more dissatisfied by her suggestion.

I’d been hoping that she might have more scientific methods for me to try. I suppose I’d always thought of monster-hunting as being a bit more exciting than just sitting staring at a lake. I wanted underwater cameras, sonars, submarine trips . . .

With my sighting in the bag, however, I was very happy just to show her the footage on my iPhone and wallow in the glory She watched it without saying a word but her eyes were sharp and focused on my little screen. When it finished she looked up at me and smiled.

I secretly wondered whether I’d make it into her next book. I sat back, hoping for something to now happen. Maybe the international news media would start swarming in? Possibly I would be asked to tell my story to packed amphitheatres? Whatever, I was sure that Arlene would know what to do. She did nothing. After some polite conversation she offered me some tea and biscuits. It was all a bit of a let-down.

I said goodbye to Arlene and drove away a little disappointed. I wasn’t sure quite what I’d expected . . . But I hadn’t got it. Once back at my hotel I sat on my new balcony and watched the lake.

I watched the lake for quite some time until I started to get bored of watching the lake and wandered downstairs to have a meal. I ate some duck with a bottle of local wine. It was exceptionally good wine. I asked the waitress where the winery was and she told me that it was fairly nearby, on a hill ‘with an amazing view of the lake’. I figured if I was going to have to stare at the lake then I should do it from a winery rather than my hotel balcony. I thanked her and said, ‘I saw Ogopogo yesterday.’ She looked at me blankly and I didn’t pursue the matter.

Therefore, the following morning, I found myself driving through the plush Mission quarter of Kelowna until the road started to climb out of town. Soon I was high above the lake in front of the Summerhill Pyramid Winery. To my right as I drove in was a gargantuan grey pyramid overlooking the lake. What was it with this valley and bloody pyramids?

It was an absolutely gorgeous day and I stood on the terrace overlooking a vast expanse of the lake. I could clearly see the bridge the scuba divers had resigned from working on after spotting ‘large objects’ down there. It was a curious design: solid, flat concrete blocks were set in the water from both banks. In the centre two arches in the shape of humps rose into the air; these allowed boat traffic through. It basically created a narrow funnel in the middle of the lake. For Ogopogo to travel from north to south, or vice versa, he’d have to swim beneath these two arches. Surely science was at a stage where two motion-sensor cameras could be placed underwater? I supposed it was money: who would pay for something like that? A monster-hunter, that’s who, so technically me . . . I sat on the terrace of the winery and gorged myself on the beautiful view and a Mimosa.

I got chatting to the waitress and asked whether she’d seen Ogopogo. She said no, but she had a friend who’d seen it -although he wouldn’t talk to media because everyone would laugh at him. She said she tried not to think about Ogopogo when she was swimming in the lake. A manager approached my table and asked me where I was from and whether I would like a tour of the winery. Why not?

Two minutes into the tour I remembered why not. I’d already promised myself I’d never go on another winery tour ever again. They’re all identical and incredibly dull. Nobody cares how the stuff’s made – just pour some into a glass and get on with it. I’ve always found myself trying to ask intelligent-sounding questions that I couldn’t really give a shit about. It’s weird: people don’t go on tours of biscuit factories or tuna canneries (although both would be more interesting), so why do we go to wineries? The answer is that we all think we’re going to get free wine under the auspices of ‘tasting’ – but so what? Are we really that cheap?

All this was going through my mind as I was shown a kylini, an old Indian-style home like a huge underground yurt. We descended some steps into the cavernous room with a chimney in the centre for the smoke from the fire to escape through. There were a couple of teens with dreads cleaning up after an event the previous night.

I nodded like this should have been obvious but started to wonder whether I had stumbled into some New-Age vacation retreat by mistake. As we climbed up towards the pyramid my guide told me that it was exactly an eighth the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza. I’ve been to the Pyramids and, looking at this edifice, I privately doubted her claim but I kept schtum. My guide told me (though it was rapidly becoming obvious anyway) that the owners of this winery were hippies and very spiritually inclined. All the wine made on the property had to be stored for a certain time in the pyramid as ‘history suggests that pyramids have magical powers over liquids’. The owner claimed to have blind-tested people on two versions of the same wine, one that had been ‘pyramided’ and one that hadn’t. Ninety per cent supposedly preferred the pyramided wine. I didn’t really know what to say. I just did my nodding thing and wondered how long it would be until I could get some free wine.

‘I believe this is the only winery in the world where the wine is stored in a pyramid . . .’ said my guide.

I wasn’t going to argue but . . . So fucking what? I tried to steer the subject away from New-Age bollocks to something a lot more real: Ogopogo. I asked my guide if she had ever seen it. She said that she hadn’t but her dad was a firm believer. He’d been out on his boat as an eighteen-year-old when Ogopogo surfaced right in front of him. He saw two huge humps and massive water displacement. It lasted for about thirty seconds and then it was gone. She said that he was loath to talk about it with strangers but all the family had heard the story many times.

We left the pyramid and got to the tasting room. I knocked back about seven glasses of sparkling wine in quick succession and started waffling on about how pyramidic it all tasted. She could tell I was taking the piss and it soon became clear that both the tour and the free wine were at an end.

All this fizzy stuff had gone to my head a touch so I decided to go for a short walk. I headed off down a quiet little road that snaked south just above the lake. There was hardly anybody about and I thought I could find a spot to sit and watch the lake for a while. After about five minutes I spotted a narrow turn-off towards a viewpoint, the edge of a tall cliff with a perfect panorama of the lake. There was nobody about except for one man, sat alone on the edge of the cliff on a collapsible camping chair. He had a flask of something by his side and was scanning the lake with a medium-sized pair of binoculars. I sensed a kindred spirit. I wandered up to the edge of the cliff and looked out as well. He noticed me and we nodded politely at each other. Emboldened, I approached him.

I tried to stop the moment I started saying it, realizing that, should he happen not to be familiar with the legend, this would sound very much like an offer of some rather specialist gay sex.

He wasn’t familiar with the legend and suddenly looked very panicky. He replied defensively.

Mortified, I tried to explain that I was talking about a lake monster and that I wasn’t some cliff-top cruiser but this just made things worse. I eventually slipped away after forcing myself to stay and survey the lake for a couple of faux-nonchalant beats while trying to look really relaxed. He watched me walk away while shaking his head in clear disgust.

As I walked on downhill I laughed to myself at the absurdity of the situation. A bit further down the road there was a sign for a car park: ‘Cedar Creek Beach’. Just beyond it was a little pebble peach and the water actually looked quite inviting – the sun sparkled off it and there was nobody around. The water was reasonably shallow but I could see where it dropped away about 100 yards offshore. The guys who’d taken me out to Rattlesnake Island had mentioned that Kelowna was actually built on a rock shelf that jutted out into the lake. I had a strong urge to swim. I was a little freaked out about swimming in these waters but something inside me wanted to try to conquer my fears. Also it was really quite hot and I knew I could do with a cool down. I could see the bottom and it was a mixture of seaweedy-type stuff and big round pebbles. I decided to go for it. I didn’t have any swimming trunks or towel with me but a ‘what the fuck’ feeling enveloped me and I felt adventurous. I looked around: both the car park and the beach were totally deserted. I stripped off naked, took one last look around and headed off towards the water holding my left hand over my privates. I gingerly stepped on to the beach and started walking into the lake until I was about knee-deep. It was crazily cold and I realized that this was going to be a very quick dip in and out but I was determined to at least submerge myself once in Ogopogo’s home. I stepped forward again and suddenly felt a searing pain in my left foot. I’d stepped on something incredibly sharp – I don’t know if it was a piece of broken glass, a can, or whatever, but it had made a huge cut in my foot and I was in incredible pain. I screamed blue murder: ‘Fuck . . . ! Fuckity fuck . . . Fuck fuckity shitting fuck!’ Screaming obscenities made me feel a little better.

My hand had come off my freezing privates and I was now dancing about in the shallow waters with my hands on the side of my head trying to somehow compress the pain away. The sound of my screaming echoed around the beach and bounced off the tall cliffs around me. It was only after about twenty seconds that I happened to look up. The man on the chair who’d presumed I’d offered him specialist gay sex was now standing on the edge of the cliff looking right down at my naked form hopping and screaming in the shallow waters of Lake Okanagan. Our eyes met for a second and, even at that distance, I could sense a mixture of withering pity and disgust. It was useless trying to explain.

I bolted back to the car park, grabbed my clothes and legged it. I eventually found cover in a little copse of trees, got dressed and tried to wrap my T-shirt round my bleeding foot.

This was turning into a stressful Sunday. I was bored of hotel food so decided to head into town for dinner. Sunday nights in Kelowna were not rocking and there wasn’t that much open. Eventually I opted for a chain place called the Keg. It was semi-buzzing and did obese portions of steak and seafood. At the back of my mind I was worried that I might bump into my cliff-top friend – and if I did, I wanted to look as manly as possible, downing pints, eating raw meat and talking to loggers . . . Actually, talking to loggers sounded a bit weird as well.

So, I was sitting at the bar nursing a pint and watching Canadian football. For some unfathomable reason this is slightly different from the American version so they can’t play each other. The Canadian version has twelve players on the pitch, as opposed to the American eleven, and they have only three downs per possession whereas the American game has four.

Not that this really matters: Canadians are all about ice hockey anyway. Kelowna’s ice-hockey team is the Rockets and they have Ogopogo as their mascot. The team was originally from Tacoma, just below Seattle, but they were surrounded by big cities so they moved to Kelowna for more fans. They kept the name Rockets because Tacoma was where Boeing made rockets but they adopted Ogopogo as a mascot to incorporate some local colour.

But I digress. I was at the bar in the Keg when a face suddenly came right up to mine.

‘Hey, how are you?’ I said, desperately trying to work out who she might be.

Suddenly I clicked: this was the waitress from the winery and it looked like news of my anal cruising hadn’t yet spread too far.

She moved on to join a table of friends for dinner and I returned to my pint. Then Krist Novoselic walked in. I first noticed him because he was freakishly tall – around six feet seven, maybe eight? He had put on some serious poundage since his skinny youth noodling on the bass in Nirvana but it was him all right. I was certain. He was with a girl much younger than him. She was pretty and blonde with a weird name like Skylar. I know this because the barman went a little gushy and asked Krist how he was doing. Krist nodded and introduced Skylar. The barman totally ignored me from then on and just talked to Krist. He asked Krist if he was playing at the moment. Krist nodded and mentioned a couple of gigs. Did Krist want something to eat, wondered the wide-eyed barman? No he didn’t; he and Skylar were just having a drink and then going to see a friend in a band. I liked Krist. Krist seemed nice.

I moved into major eavesdropping mode. I love listening to other people’s conversations, especially when those people used to be in Nirvana. It made total sense that he should be here. Seattle is only an hour or so away from Kelowna and lots of famous people have houses here on the lake: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Wayne Gretzky . . . And, clearly, Krist Novoselic from Nirvana. I pretended to play with my iPad while I listened in. Krist was telling Skylar, clearly a musician herself, that he was really impressed with her playing.

‘You know the chords,’ he said, smiling at her, ‘but now you need anticipation.’

Skylar looked at him adoringly and Krist continued with his master class. Krist told her that when he saw a hand move over a fretboard he instinctively knew what was going to be played, allowing him to kick in bang on time, not a millisecond late.

Skylar lapped it all up. I tried to think about what I knew of him – I thought he was Croatian in origin and he started the band with Kurt; he fought with Courtney Love over the Nirvana legacy and he was pretty political . . . Oh and he once hit me over the head with his bass guitar.

This is a true story, I swear. When I was at SOAS in London for my university years I used to help organize bands to play at the union. We once got an offer of a band I loved, Mudhoney, but we also had to take the band supporting them on their mini Sub Pop tour. We weren’t happy but said yes, as we really wanted Mudhoney. That support band was, of course, Nirvana, who’d just finished their first album, Bleach, and were relatively unknown. Come the day of the gig, I told them that they had five songs and then they were off so Mudhoney could come on. They ignored me and played on into a sixth song so I pulled the plug on their PA. The band went mental and Krist swung his bass guitar at me, and it glanced off my head. Never mind, though – my job was done: we wanted Mudhoney on, not these grungy losers . . . Whatever happened to Mudhoney?

I looked over at Krist again wondering if I should just bring this up. We’d all laugh about it and he’d invite me along to the gig tonight? But Krist was now busy tongue-sandwiching Skylar so conversation was difficult. Whatever, I needed proof of this encounter. I waited until they came up for air and then brought out my iPhone. It was in a casing designed to look like an old cassette tape so it was quite subtle. I turned the camera on and manoeuvred the thing so that it was pointing to my left – right at Krist. I paused then pressed the button. To my horror the flash went off. I’d turned it on to get a photo of Arlene Gaal in her dark house. Krist and Skylar both looked up with a start and stared at me. I went into panic mode and started fiddling with the phone as though it was faulty. I made the flash go off a couple more times in my face to make it look like I was just an idiot trying to get the camera to work. There was no way I could talk to him now but at least I had proof. I surreptitiously checked the shot and the photo was clear. I wolfed down a New York striploin and then left about the same time as Krist, who towered over Skylar as they walked off arm in arm. I briefly considered following them to their gig but realized this might be a tad creepy. I’d once done this when I spotted Mick Jones from the Clash in my local Tesco in Portobello Road. I followed him all the way to Holland Park and watched him browse through the paperback section in a charity store. I thought I was being subtle but, years later, when Trigger Happy TV was at its height, I ended up at his house with a group of people that, weirdly, also included Kate Moss and Sadie Frost (I know – clang, clang – who dropped those names? But it was just a weird night). Anyway, I’d got talking to Mick Jones and he was bit pissed and he ended up saying, ‘You followed me once all the way home from Portobello – I thought you were doing some hidden-camera stunt on me.’ I was mortified and slipped out soon after.

I drove back to my hotel and immediately googled a recent photo of Krist. It definitely wasn’t my guy. I couldn’t believe it. I was angry. What was this fraudulent bastard doing swanning around pretending to be Krist Novoselic? Then I remembered that he’d never claimed to be him. It had been me who’d made that supposition and, not for the first time in my life, I felt a bit of an arse.

The next morning I awoke early and snuck up to the curtains, whipping them open with some force as though I was going to somehow surprise Ogopogo and catch him mid-feed with a red face staring up at me. But there was only a lone duck who proceeded to ‘duck’ down leaving only his feathered ass wiggling insultingly in my direction.

It was my final day in the Okanagan and I’d agreed to go on a little road trip with Al, one of the two guys who’d taken me out on the boat. He was going to collect me in his enormo-pickup truck and we were going up to Myra Canyon to check out the old railway line. There was little chance of lake monsters in the mountains but Al said it was something that I had to see – and, besides, there was a chance to see cougars, bears and wolverines. I wasn’t quite sure what a wolverine was. I thought they were fictional creatures? (In the eighties Brat Pack flick Red Dawn, the Russians invade the USA and the kids from the high school run to the hills and become resistance fighters – calling themselves ‘Wolverines’.) Al didn’t know how to describe a wolverine but he settled on ROUS (Rodent of Unusual Size). He said it was like a huge chipmunk, the size of a goat with big teeth and long sharp claws. ‘They are mean sons of bitches,’ said Al.

At the entrance to the trail was a large handwritten sign warning that a bear had been spotted with cubs. ‘Under no circumstance should you run away from a bear unless you have somewhere to go . . .’ was the very curious advice here.

I’d seen other signs in the valley that suggested you take a bell with you on hikes and ring it frantically should a bear approach. I decided that, should we be faced with this predicament, I’d stand directly behind Al and cower.

The old railway line spanned the entire canyon and used to be used to transport gold from mines in the hills. It was a spectacular feat of engineering that had burnt down in the huge forest fire of 2003. The bridges had been restored and now comprised part of a cycling and hiking trail. We walked and walked and walked. I had no idea how far Al intended to go but I didn’t want to look like a wimp. This was a big day for my left foot. In 2011 I broke three metatarsals on a TV show in Argentina and this would be the first big test of my recovery. At the sixth mile I couldn’t walk much more and had to sit down and take my boot off. I think Al was secretly quite chuffed that he’d ‘broken’ me and went a bit easier on me as I hobbled back towards his pickup.

Sadly there were no signs of bears, cougars or wolverines. The Okanagan Valley is not one to easily give up her fierce creatures – real or fictional.

We drove back down to Kelowna, where Al left me to a final spot of monster-hunting. Just along the shoreline from my hotel I’d bumped into a guy who had a boat he could rent me for the afternoon. It had a depth finder and a fish finder. This kind of sonar device could possibly help me spot an unusually large creature in the water beneath me.

Having left a hefty deposit, I roared off over the lake. It was like a mirror: ‘perfect Ogopogo conditions’, the renter had said just before I set off. Once again mine was the only boat on the entire eighty-mile expanse. I wanted to head north this time and this meant going under the new bridge. I put-putted under the left-hand arch and looked down into the black water. The fish finder was not seeing anything. I headed out into the very centre of the lake. The depth finder told me that it was 356 feet deep. Not bad, but there are areas near Squally Point that supposedly go down to 800 feet.

I turned the engine off and all was silent. I floated quietly on Lake Okanagan, all alone save for a solitary loon staring at this loony cockily. I peered earnestly at the fish finder but it could find no fish let alone a monster. I could see how an obsession with something in this lake could drive a man insane after a while. The more you told people about your obsession the more determined you’d become to prove it so they’d stop referring to you as ‘that monster guy’, the loony who believed in Ogopogo. Now I was a loony who thought he’d seen Ogopogo, endlessly propping up bars showing people the footage as they attempted to shuffle a couple of stools away. After an hour or so, I gave up. I switched on the engine and turned for home. As I docked the boat I wondered what had happened to Eddy Haymour’s statue after his death. Here was an inhabitant of the Okanagan who’d been driven crazy by a different obsession. There was no record of Eddy ever having seen Ogopogo; he’d simply used the story to help him with his brilliantly crazy project. It was funny, two people – Eddy and myself – both born in Lebanon, both fixated by something in this curious stretch of water so very far away from the distant cedars of our homeland. I turned towards the lake for the last time and gave a little nod to both Ogopogo and Eddy Haymour. Things and people like these are what make life so interesting.