While a 14-year-old boy was out fishing, he hooked a farmer’s lost wallet and discovered it was full of cash. Thanks to his old man, he knew what he had to do. Now, he has one of the best fishing stories to tell.
Connor Halsa made the catch of a lifetime while the 14-year-old kid from Moorhead, Minnesota, was out trolling for walleyes in 20 feet of choppy water on Lake of the Woods in southern Oregon with his family. However, this one wasn’t “a keeper.” Although he initially thought he had hooked a huge fish, Connor quickly realized he had hooked something much more valuable.
“We were doing a walleye drift, so we stopped the boat, put some spinners on, and let the waves take us,” Connor Halsa recalled. “I thought I had a huge fish, so I set the hook really hard.”
Instead of gills, this one had bills — $2,000 worth to be exact. As it turns out, Connor had reeled in a lost wallet stuffed full of cash after he drifted to the exact place Iowa farmer Jim Denney had lost his billfold the year before.
The chance catch was miraculous, to say the least, especially when you consider that the lake is some 85 miles long and 56 miles across at its widest, and its serendipitous waves brought Connor directly over the resting place of Jim Denney’s wallet, which was stuck 20 feet below in the glacial deeps, according to The Blaze.
“My cousin Brandon opened the wallet up and he was like, he said some words that you probably shouldn’t say, and then he said there was some money in it, and he like showed everyone. And then we like took the money out and placed it all on the dashboard to let it dry off,” Connor said.
Although $2,000 can go a very long way, especially for a teen, Connor Halsa knew he couldn’t keep it, thanks to a valuable lesson he had gotten from his own old man.
“My dad said we should give it to the person, and I said we should too,” Connor recalled, adding that the rightful owner had worked hard for that money.
Thankfully, inside the water-logged wallet was a business card with a phone number belonging to a livestock owner in western Wisconsin — and that proved to be enough for the family to track down the billfold’s rightful owner. However, simply receiving his lost wallet wasn’t enough for Jim Denney. He wanted to meet the honest kid who wanted to return his billfold and all of the cash it contained.
According to the farmer, he had come up against some rough waters the year before, and his wallet went overboard. However, he didn’t realize he had lost it until he was back on dry land and found the pocket of his overalls was empty when he went to retrieve his billfold to pay his final bill at the resort.
“The water was really rough, and I was sitting on the back of the boat and it was rocking back and forth, and it worked itself out and slipped off into the water,” Denney recalled. “They had to float me the money for the whole deal. That’s the (worst) feeling I ever had, didn’t have a penny on me.”
Of course, Denney thought his wallet and the $2,000 inside were both long gone, so he was shocked and amazed by his luck when it was returned a year later. Grateful for Connor Halsa’s virtue, the farmer reportedly offered the boy a reward, but the honest young man politely declined.
“I tell you what, I have the billfold in my hands, and it is still hard to believe,” Denney admitted. “To meet people like that, who are that honest, I tried to get them to take the money, and they wouldn’t do it,” he continued.
Although Connor refused a monetary reward, he did accept a custom-made cooler that the grateful farmer gifted him, and Jim Denney also took Connor’s whole family out for dinner as a way to say, “Thank you.” However, the compliment on the teen’s character was worth more than the cash he found at the bottom of Lake of the Woods.
“I would take Connor as a grandson any day, and I would fight for him any day,” Denney said. “The whole family is out of this world,” he added. “The only things you hear about anymore is crime and stuff like that. For someone to find something like that — which is pert-near impossible to begin with — it needs to be put out there” in the news.
But perhaps even more valuable than the compliment Connor Halsa received is the great lessons he learned about himself and doing what’s right — a lesson he learned from his dad. And, it’s a lesson that needs to be shared.
“Be nice to everyone and give back. We didn’t work hard for the money, he did. It was his money,” Connor said.
This is one fishing story that should never get old. It was literally one miracle after another, and the odds of things playing out exactly as they did were out of this world. A billfold the size of a deck of cards was hooked in a million acres of lake a year after it was lost. It was reeled in by an honest family, and although water-logged, it still contained a card with a legible phone number that led to its rightful owner. That’s nothing short of amazing, and it’s also a great reminder to do what’s right when given the chance. Job well done, Connor Halsa!
