As a kid, Jason Ploeger remembers people searching in the waters of Larder Lake for a taxi cab that sank beneath the surface decades before.
And of course, like everyone else in the small northern Ontario town near the Québec border that was once a major gold mining centre, he heard the stories.
Ploeger spent 35 years searching for the taxi and then while fishing in a local derby last year, he saw something come up on the screen of his side imager that he uses to look deep into the lake for fish. Or sunken treasure.
… he marked the spot and went back later with some fellow divers, going down 15 metres into the pitch black waters of Larder Lake.
I love stories like this
Growing up in northern Ontario my dad used to read us poetry, with a family favourite being The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service.
In 2009 they found the wreck of the A J Goddard on Lake Laberge (also using a fish finder) which sank just a three years before the poem was written. At the time my brother and I were excited thinking it was the same boat as in the poem, but later I learned the poem is based on an cremation in the engine of a different wrecked ship. It was very fun speculating though! You never really think of how dangerous those boats were.
Another interesting bit of trivia is that Parks Canada actually owns (manages?) two shipwrecks in the Arctic, the HMS Terror and the Erebus, which were only discovered in 2016 and 2014 respectively. Inuit oral stories and legends actually resulted in the discovery of the wrecks 170 years later, it’s a very interesting story.