1,000 pound rumour

My how the rumour mill has changed but yet stayed the same over the years.
We all know the exercise. Sit in a circle, whisper a story to the person next to you and then have them do the same to the next person and so on. Then the last person tells the tale and amazingly it has changed quite a bit from the original story.
Well something similar happened to me last week... in fact it happened to a much larger fish in the newspaper sea.
I received a call from the Winnipeg Free Press asking if I had heard about a 1,000 lb. sturgeon being caught at the mouth of the Rainy River.
Of course I did not believe such a fish had been caught without everyone in RR and Baudette talking about it.
The Free Press sent me the email which said the pictured fish (see front page) was caught on the Rainy River.
I called the Baudette Region, Minnesota DNR and then began searching on the internet. Eventually I discovered the photo on two different websites.
Apparently the fish was caught on a river but in was caught in British Columbia, not the Rainy River.
However the photo travelled all around the country via email and somewhere along the way the original story was changed to say it was caught here. It is also a White Sturgeon, a different species than the ones caught on the Rainy River.
While I was suspicious right from the get go, I did enjoy having fun tracking down the truth in the rumour.
It did make for fun fodder for the Beaver Boat Races, considering an unidentified monster has been used to hype that event up this weekend.

–Until then,
Ken