A teen from Minnesota was on a fishing trip when he reeled in one heck of a catch.
“I was shocked,” Connor Halsa, Moorehead, Minnesota, said.
He had hooked a wallet that contained $2,000 in cash.
“We were doing some walleye fishing and then going out to an island on Lake of the Woods,” Halsa said.
“It was pretty windy.”
After about an hour of fishing the teen thought he had hooked a giant.
“I felt something on my line and I reeled it up,” he said. “I thought it was going to be a really big walleye — bigger than what we usually catch up there, by the way it felt.”
His cousin grabbed a net, thinking they’d hooked a monster but instead, it was a bag.
At first, I thought it could have been a fish, I guess, 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,” Halsa said.
“It wasn’t my money,” Halsa said. Adding that the family wanted to try and find the owner but nothing in the wallet had a phone number.
There was a single business card found to a rancher from Wisconsin who was able to help.
It turns out that in July 2022, Jim Denney, 75, from Mount Ayr, Iowa, was with his wife on a fishing expedition at the same lake.
When it was time to pay for the trip he realized his billfold was missing.
“I reached back there and there’s no billfold,” Denny told Fox News Digital. “I was devastated. I just didn’t know what the heck to do. There I was, broke. So, the other guys floated me the money to pay up.”
“I wear bib overalls and it was in the back pocket pretty deep anyway. I had never lost anything out of my pocket, but I was leaning against the edge of that boat. I reckon it just worked up out of there and when I was fishing it went and fell in the water.”
“That’s a million-acre lake,” Denney said. “And you can’t see from shore to shore, it’s so wide. They said it’s 70-something miles long and 70-something mile wide.”
Denney had pretty much accepted that his wallet and money was gone for good.
Until almost a year later.
The cattle rancher that the Halsa’s family contacted was able to get in touch with Denny informing him his lost money was found and they were going to send it to him.
Denny told them to keep the money it was already lost but the Halsa family refused.
“That’s a million-acre lake,” Denney said. “And you can’t see from shore to shore, it’s so wide. They said it’s 70-something miles long and 70-something mile wide.”
The families did meet up and Denny took the family out for dinner and took pictures together.
