128 NICE CATCH, NICE RELEASE

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BOY HOOKS WALLET WITH USD$2,000 IN CASH AND RETURNS IT

A Minnesota teen reeled in a catch worth thousands while on a fishing trip this summer — but he could not fry this one up for dinner.

Actually, he had hooked a treasure that had been on the bottom of the lake for a whole year. And he made a lifelong friend, because of it.

"I was shocked," Connor Halsa of Moorhead, Minnesota, said about the surprise he found on the end of his line while fishing with his family on Lake of the Woods over the July 4^th weekend.

Connor said he had been fishing for about an hour without catching anything.

"Then, I felt something on my line, and I reeled it up," he said. "I thought it was going to be a really big fish— bigger than what we usually catch up there, from the way it felt."

His cousin Brandon got a net ready to help him bring in the fish.

"But when my cousin pulled it out of the water with the net, I was really confused," Connor said.

"At first, I thought it could have been a fish because it was brown and slimy."

But on the hook, instead, was an old brown billfold, covered in moss and muck.

"Everyone started going through it to try to find the dude it belonged to," Connor said.

Inside the billfold was a driver’s license, a few credit cards — and $2,000 in cash.

Connor said he and his family immediately knew that they needed to find the owner.

"It wasn’t my money," Connor said.

Unfortunately, there was no phone number for him to use to reach the wallet’s owner.

There was, however, a business card from a cattle rancher in Wisconsin named Sherry — who would eventually connect Connor with the wallet owner who lived more than 500 miles (800 km) away from Moorhead.

In July 2022, Jim Denney, 75, and his wife Karen, from Iowa, and some friends had taken a fishing trip to Lake of the Woods.

On the last night of the trip, Jim said he went to pay his bill, but his pocket was empty.

"I reached back there, and there was no billfold," he said.

"I was devastated. I just didn't know what the heck to do. There I was—broke. So, the other guys lent me the money to pay up."

The group had been out on the water all day, and Jim said he had "a sunken feeling."

"The water was just rougher than the dickens that day," Jim remembers.

"I wear bib overalls, and my wallet had been pretty deep in the back pocket. I had never before lost anything out of my pocket, but I was leaning against the edge of that boat. I suppose that it just worked up out of there, and when I was fishing, it went and fell in the water."

The fishermen returned to the boat dock to look for Jim’s billfold, but they found nothing.

"That is a million-acre lake," he said. "And you cannot see from shore to shore. It is so wide."

Jim said he accepted that his billfold — and his money — were somewhere at the bottom of the lake, which has an average depth of 27 feet (8 m), but in some areas it is more than 200 feet (60 m) deep.

But on July 7, 2023, Jim was sitting in a parking lot near his home when he got a call from a rancher that he had hauled cattle for — and she wanted to know if he had been on any fishing trips recently.

"I told her I went fishing in Minnesota last year," Jim said. "And I lost my billfold," he told her.

After that, Jim got a call from Connor Halsa's Aunt Christie, who said that her nephew "had caught" Jim’s wallet from the bottom of the Lake of the Woods.

He could not believe it.

"I said, ‘That is impossible,'" Jim recalled, remembering that it was nearly a year that his wallet had been underwater. "And she said she wanted to know how they could send it back to me."

Aunt Christie said that his billfold was "a terrible mess" but that it had "a lot of money in it."

"I said, ‘Yeah, I know,'" Jim replied.

"I told the lady, ‘You guys keep the money.’ And she said, ‘No, we are not going to do that. We are going to send it back to you.' And they did. They had cleaned it up. That money looked as if they had rinsed it off or something. Most of the slime was off, anyway."

Jim said he was very grateful to "the whole bunch of them."

But he could not leave it at that — and insisted on driving to Moorhead to take the family to dinner.

"I told them, ‘I am coming to Minnesota to meet you folks because I am going to take you out for the biggest supper you ever ate,’" Jim said.

"She would not say a lot, but she told me not to bring them anything or any reward money or anything like that. ‘Because we won't take it,’ she said."

So, Jim Denney decided to give young Connor Halsa a customized Yeti cooler, as a way of showing his appreciation for the young fisherman's act of honesty.

The group decided on dinner in nearby Fargo, North Dakota, and there, Jim presented Connor with the special gift.

"A Yeti cooler," he said. "I took it up to a local printer, and they printed it with his name and a fish picture. That way, he had to take it!"

Connor said he never thought of keeping the money for himself — and said he would tell others to always look for the rightful owner first, if faced with the same situation.

"He is the top of the line," Jim said. "He said he knew I had worked hard for my money. He and his dad both made that remark. They wanted to get it back to me."

After dinner, the families went back to the campground where Jim and his wife were staying and sat around a campfire for a while longer.

"I told Connor, ‘I would like to have seen the expression on your face when you brought it up out of the water and saw all the money,'" said Jim, laughing.

"They are quite the family. We will stay in touch, no doubt," he added.

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