Minnesota Teen Fishes Wallet With $2,000 Out of a Lake and Tracks Down Owner to Return It

A teenager from Minnesota hooked and returned an expensive catch while fishing.

Connor Halsa, 14, was fishing in Lake of the Woods with his family when he caught something that wasn’t a fish, Inforum reported.

"I thought I had a huge fish, so I set the hook really hard," Halsa told Inforum.

When Halsa and his cousin pulled his catch out of the water and took a look at it, they realized that they caught a wallet that was filled with $2,000 in cash, according to Inforum.

“We took the money out and let it dry out," Halsa told WDAY-TV. "My dad said we should give it to the person, and I said we should, too.”

Halsa and his family found a business card in the wallet and were able to use it to track down the wallet’s owner.

A farmer in Iowa, Jim Denney, turned out to be the owner of the sunken wallet. He told Inforum that he had been fishing at that lake a year ago when he later realized he lost the wallet. 

"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 told Inforum. 

The farmer didn’t realize until he went to pay for his resort stay and found that he didn’t have his wallet anymore.

"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 told Inforum.

Finding the small wallet in the over one-million-acre lake was incredibly lucky and hard for the Iowa man to believe. 

"I tell you what, I have the billfold in my hands, and it is still hard to believe,” Denney told WDAY-TV. "The odds of ever finding or hooking a billfold in 20 feet of water — I don't think there's a number."

Since Halsa and his family refused to accept money as a thank you from Denney, the Iowa farmer met them in Moorehead and gave the young fisherman a fancy new cooler.

"I would take Connor as a grandson any day, and I would fight for him any day," Denney said, Inforum reported. "To meet people like that, who are that honest, I tried to get them to take the money, and they wouldn't do it.”

Halsa said he took away life lessons from the incident, saying "Be nice to everyone and give back. We didn't work hard for the money, he did. It was his money," according to Inforum. 

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