An ancient Karelian legend says that before the Earth appeared, there was a sea everywhere, the wind drove huge waves over it, and their terrible roar reached the very sky. God bored with this restless noise, and He ordered the sea to petrify. Since then, the waves have become mountains, and the spray of water has turned into stones and rocks. Blue lakes splashed quietly among them.
And although this legend was born on the Karelian land, one involuntarily recalls it, traveling to many places in the Leningrad region. The lakes of the Central Karelian Upland are of particular interest. One of them - Khepojarvi, located near the village of Toksovo - may have its own Nessie.
Lake Khepojärvi
On the eastern slopes of the Toksovskaya Upland, in the basin, there is Lake Khepojarvi ("Horse Lake"), with an area of about 4.2 square kilometers. On three sides it is surrounded by high sandy hills, among which Tea Mountain stands out in the northwest.
The lake has many open bays and bays. Their banks are mostly composed of coarse sand and pebbles. Sometimes large boulders show their sloping backs from the water.
The bottom of the reservoir is sandy, and in deep-water places it is silty. The greatest depth - 12.5 meters - is located in the central part, while the average depth of Khepojärvi is 3.8 meters.
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The lake is located in the watershed between the basins of the Okhta, which flows into the Neva, and the Morya, a channel of Lake Ladoga.
The monster appears
In the summer of 1998, N. Banykin, a senior fireman at the Spartak base, walked along the shore early in the morning after a night shift. Tired, he lay down by the water and dozed off. When he woke up, he saw in front of him a head resembling a snake, on a long neck. The yellow eyes of the incredible creature glared at the man. From surprise and fright, the stoker swore loudly, and the muzzle of this fiend of hell immediately disappeared into the dense thickets of reeds.
Stunned by the meeting with the mysterious, Banykin rushed to the base with all his might and told about the fantastic creature. However, the attempt to catch the monster ended in failure. Neither a thorough combing of the coastal waters of the reservoir with nonsense, nor observation of the water surface through binoculars yielded anything.
The second case of a meeting of people with an unknown occurred at about fourteen hours of the same day. Numerous vacationers and summer residents who were sunbathing by the lake were eyewitnesses. Suddenly, about twenty meters from the shore, water "boiled", and a toy rubber crocodile of gray-green color, about twenty-five centimeters in size, disappeared in a small funnel.
Its small owner, fortunately, was playing in the sand at that time and did not see how the boys threw his toy away from the shore. A couple of days later, someone heavily chewed a crocodile was found at the footbridge by a summer resident washing clothes.
Observations underwater
In mid-July 1976, on an early sunny Sunday morning, the author of these lines and senior lecturer of the swimming department of the Military Institute of Physical Culture Mikhail Ivanovich Chernetz were fishing from a boat in Khepojarvi with a rod and circles. But only small perches came across, suitable only for bait.
However, a large fish splashed near the boat. What if you hunt for her with a gun underwater? - flashed through my head. No sooner said than done. A friend helped me pull on a wetsuit, and now I'm in the water. Through the glass of the mask you can see only a meter and a half, but nothing, you can hunt.
Suddenly I noticed something cigar-like, like a very large seal - about 2.5-3 meters long. To get a better look at the creature, I dived three meters. The unusual creature turned and looked at me. He had a round face, a strongly flattened nose with two small holes, a mouth (like a slit) and large eyes adapted to life in water.
They were very human-like and in the middle of the pupil, it seemed to me, contained an air bubble. The neck of the unusual creature was two to three times longer than a human. The limbs were not visible, but, apparently, the creature had a strong upright tail, as it moved like a man swimming "dolphin" in a monofin.
Our eyes met, the monster looked at me searchingly. Just in case, I pointed the trident of my spear gun towards him. It seemed to me that it understood that I was terribly scared and could foolishly pull the trigger.
It looked at the tip of the harpoon, then again into my eyes - and slowly plunged down. With all the strength I rushed to the boat, got on it and never again did spearfishing in these places.
It is curious that in July 1996, the unofficial Russian record holder in freediving (diving with holding his breath under water without a breathing apparatus according to the principle - deeper, longer, longer), Alexander Zapisetskiy, saw something similar under similar circumstances in Khepojarvi.
During spearfishing, a large living creature swam by next to him, under water. He did not examine it, but it seemed to him that it was a large dolphin.
Alexander Potapov. From the book: "Petersburg environs: Mysterious and mysterious" (2011)