A 14-year-old was fishing for walleye, but reeled in a staggering amount of cash instead.
Connor Halsa of Moorhead, Minnesota, was fishing for walleye with his family on Lake of the Woods, when his hook snagged on something unexpected.
They let their boat drift the waves of the 85-mile long lake and dropped their lines, then Connor got what he thought was a nibble from a walleye.
The high school freshmen didn’t pull up a fish, instead he had hooked a water logged wallet packed with $2,000 in cash.
“My cousin opened the wallet up, and he said some words you probably shouldn’t say,” Halsa told local news outlet WDAY-TV. “He showed everyone, and we took the money out and let it dry out.”
Instead of figuring out what he wanted to spend his new found small fortune on, Connor tried to find out who the wallet’s owner was.
“My dad said we should give it to the person, and I said we should too,” he remarked. “We didn’t work hard for the money. He did. It was his money.”
After carefully drying out the water-logged wallet, they managed to find a business card inside with a phone number belonging to a livestock owner in western Wisconsin.
Once they made the call, the family found out that the lost wallet’s owner was Jim Denney, a farmer from Iowa.
Denney had been out on the lake in a boat last summer, while staying at a nearby resort. He went overboard when his vessel was rocked by rough waves.
The farmer was able to get back on the boat, but didn’t realize his wallet, packed with cash to cover his vacation, had sunk to the bottom of the lake.
It was only a day later, when he went to close out his bill at the resort, that he found out his wallet was missing.
“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,” Denney remarked.
When Denney got the call about his wallet and the boy who found it, he traveled to Connor’s hometown to meet him.
He offered the boy a cash reward, but Connor refused to accept it. “To meet people like that, who are that honest, I tried to get them to take the money, and they wouldn’t do it,” Denney told the Star Tribune
“I tell you what, I have the billfold in my hands, and it is still hard to believe,” he said in astonishment.
