Cash Catch! Teenager Reels in $2,000 While Fishing Minnesota Lake

When I heard about this story it instantly reminded me of a radio promotion a station I used to work for did for several years back in the mid 1980s. The contest was called the "$10,000 Cash Catch."

The radio station tagged a bullhead and invited listeners to come out and try to catch the tagged fish. Should the tagged fish get caught, the lucky person who reeled it in, won $10,000 cash!

We actually had a winner one year, and I couldn't believe it. I remember thinking to myself, wow,  what are the odds that someone actually caught that tagged fish?

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A young man from Moorhead, Minnesota had a similar type of experience here recently. He made a cash catch of his own while fishing this summer, but, what he ended up reeling in was not a fish. This 14-year-old teenager caught himself a wallet from the depths of a Minnesota lake.

The young man's name is Connor Halsa, and as Dakota News Now reports, Halsa's summer vacation ended with $2,000 cash on the line.

Halsa and his family were fishing this summer while on vacation at Lake of the Woods on the Minnesota border near Canada when the teenager made the ultimate cash catch, he snagged someone's lost wallet.

According to Halsa, "I thought I had a big fish, and I set the hook really hard.”

Once Halsa discovered what he had caught, he and his cousin opened up the billfold, and soon found out they had caught a wad of cash!!

The boys took the money out of the wallet, placed it on the dashboard of the family's car to let it dry off, and began to count it.

They soon realized they had reeled in $2,000 cash! A far better catch than some walleye, or a smallmouth bass.

As Dakota News Now reports, Halsa immediately showed the catch to his father, and the boy's dad told him they needed to do the right thing, contact the owner of the wallet, and return the money.

Halsa agreed. So that's what they did. They sifted through the moss-covered wallet to look for some form of identification. Lucky for them they found a business card, with the owner's phone number on it. So they gave the owner a buzz to let him know they caught his lost wallet.

The owner of the wallet was an Iowa farmer named Jim Denney. According to Dakota News Now, Denny lost his wallet while fishing on the same lake over a year ago.

He couldn't believe the boys had actually recovered his lost billfold which is roughly the size of a deck of cards from inside a lake that is set on 1 million acres and is 70 miles long.

As Denny said, I mean the water is 20 feet deep out there, what are the odds? Almost impossible to calculate.

According to Dakota News Now, Denny soon made the trip from Iowa to Moorehead to recover his lost property. Upon arriving he even offered Halsa a reward, but the teenager refused to take it. Halsa said doing the right thing was a big enough reward for him.

Denny did however end up giving Halsa a couple of parting gifts, he rewarded the young man with a personalized cooler and paid the boy the ultimate compliment worth more than the money he found at the bottom of the lake.

Denny told Halsa, "He would take Connor for a grandson any day and I would fight for him any day."

The Iowa farmer also treated the entire Halsa family to dinner to show his appreciation.

Source: Dakota News Now