Back at the end of May, it was off once again to Loch Ness for a bit of Nessie Hunting and a bit of Nessie Fellowship. To borrow from a TV program about another mystery, it was the Fellowship of the Hunt. Loading the equipment into my car, I headed off from Edinburgh and up the familiar route of the M90 and A9 roads.
THURSDAY 30TH MAY
Towards the evening, I turned into Drumnadrochit where I would stay at the Loch Ness Hostel. I usually go camping on the other quieter side of the loch at Foyers, but since most of the action was going to be around Drumnadrochit plus Foyers was about a 25 mile drive away, it was no contest.
The "Quest" is organised by the Loch Ness Centre and they had invited anyone involved to a meet up at the Loch Ness Inn just a walk away from where I was staying. There I met up with Alan McKenna, Chie Kelly and some of the Loch Ness Exhibition staff. Alan heads up the LNE and Quest surface watches while readers will remember Chie as the lady who took that very interesting sequence of photographs in 2018 which were released last year.
So we spent the first part of the evening examining Chie's pictures and offering various opinions and observations concerning them and the very good stabilized sequence of those dozens of images further released this year. I admit I have to still to publish a follow up article based on that sequence and another meeting with Chie was organised for the days ahead.
It was at this point that exuberance entered the room. By that I mean the lively Ashley from Washington State who had travelled all that way to join the Fellowship of the Hunt. She is a die hard Nessie Fan and was keen to play her part in the loch watches that were coming up. We welcomed her into the fold and made sure she was part of the team and justified her effort to make it over here to Bonnie Scotland.
In fact, after dinner and a rest, Ashley, Alan and myself headed down to Temple Pier just before midnight to try out some equipment. In Alan's case, it was his trusty hydrophone and in my case, it was the Flir thermal camera. There were a number of boats berthed in the pier, some with occupants. Looking out across the pier to Urquhart Bay did not reveal much to the naked eye, but the FLIR infra-red revealed all as the buoys stretched out into the distance (below). However, nothing anomalous was apparent beyond these man made objects.
Alan dropped the hydrophone into the shallow waters and we listened in to the various noises it was detecting. We knew at that shallow depth and proximity to the pier that it was unlikely to be near any large aquatic creatures. So, Alan's ambition is simple yet complex - get the hydrophone out into the greater depths of mid-loch at night-time and free of all day time noises. All you need is a boat and a skipper who is qualified to navigate a boat at night-time. The complex bit is bringing all that together.
Meantime, on the active hydrophone, one persistent, gurgling noise was an outlet pipe discharging into the bay on the other side. One other noise came and went. We speculated it was someone on a berthed boat flushing their toilet. Well, the sceptics say you got to consider all possibilities. Only too happy to oblige, though Ashley thought it must have been one aggressive piece of flushing. This is a family blog, so I ain't going to enquire further into that! The fun ended at one in the morning and it was off to bed.
FRIDAY 31ST MAY
The next day started off with a solo walk around the area of Drumnadrochit. I actually had not taken a good look around the town for years and in that time it has undergone a major expansion in house building and that has not stopped as I passed by ground being cleared for further new developments. Having said that, as one walked around, it was clear that houses of various kinds had been built across the decades. It just seemed that things had accelerated.
I then headed from the new to the old, walking towards ancient Urquhart Bay for a bit of surface watching. Going through the woods before reaching the bay can be a bit of a maze before the loch comes into view. Once you get through the woods, you come to one of the rivers feeding into the bay. There is no bridge, so unless the river level is low or you have found a well placed tree trunk or stepping stones, you will likely get wet feet. Once over the river, it was a short walk and Urquhart Bay opened up before me (see image at top of article).
There were quite a few sandbanks along the way and since there had been several accounts of large beasts coming ashore here and even leaving three toed tracks, I thought I would keep my eyes open for unusual depressions in the sand. One wondered how long such spoors would persist. In any case, only deer and humans prints to report.
I stayed there for about three hours watching the loch and any activity around it. A swan glided past into the bay (below). A guy with his family stripped to his pants and dived in the cold loch, Various dogs darted about, including one that misjudged the depth of the shallows and plopped out of sight before quickly reappearing. No sign of any larger creatures appearing out of the water though.
After this ended, it was back to the Loch Ness Inn at 7pm to meet Alan McKenna and Chie for a closer look at her photos. Later on, Dave from Birmingham turned up in his car for the Quest. I already knew Dave from his postings on various cryptids groups, so it was good to meet him in the flesh. Once we met up with Ashley, it was decided to go back out that night with the equipment, but a different location.
What Alan wanted to do was get to the jetty where various boats dock to let the tourists off at the castle. From the end of that pier, the water is deeper than what we were limited to at Temple Pier. Little did I know what an expedition this turned out to be. Alan, Dave, Ashley and myself parked up on the road by the castle and headed towards the pier only to be confronted by fields of prickly gorse bush and thick fern. However, we did beat a path to a wire fence which barred our way to the pier.
It was eminently scalable, but not everyone was onboard with vaulting over it, lol. We headed the other way towards the shore, but the drop was too steep and slippery plus it was getting dark. Prior to that Dave had dropped his mobile phone somewhere along the way, but the Fellowship of the Hunt proved their hunting skills in tracking it down. If only Nessie was that easy to find! So with sodden socks and a few marks from being assaulted by the gorse bushes, we defaulted back to Temple Pier where we showed Dave the gadgets we used twenty four hours before.
SATURDAY 1ST JUNE
The "Quest" began the next day at 0930. The media scrum of last year was not so evident and it looked like volunteers just picked up any guidance from online. In fact, those late nights at Temple Pier must have had their effect as I turned up late. Alan and Ashley were heading off to help on the Deepscan boat, so I offered to head off with Dave around the loch stopping at the various designated observation points as well as a few other spots.
I was also a kind of tour guide and would point out to Dave various events of significance as we went along in his car and its complement of Godzilla figures adding to the monster atmosphere. First up was Altsigh where John MacLean had his famous sighting back in 1938 where he spotted this beast.
By now the weather was beautiful as the sun shone down upon us in complete contrast to the downpour of last year. We went down past the backpackers hostel to the spit of beach at the mouth of the Altsigh stream where McLean had his encounter. Dave is a expert in photography and filming who lectures on the subject as well as making his own documentaries. So, he brought some heavy duty equipment with him ready to capture in high quality anything that stirred on the loch.
One thing we discussed was Adrian Shine's theory that McLean only saw an otter which fooled him as he was looking across the loch almost eye level with the water and hence lacking a frame of reference. I demonstrated to Dave how this was wrong as McLean is documented as pointing across the mouth of the Altsigh to the same shoreline he was on and where the creature was. In other words, the near shoreline provided a frame of reference not far behind the creature which itself was twenty yards away. Add the fact that McLean was a regular and experienced angler at the loch and one wonders what could possibly go wrong?
The only fallback as ever is to declare he was a liar but sceptics are averse to doing this as it comes across as simplistic and lacking in any critical analysis skills.
So we were off to a good start and next up was the Horseshoe Scree on the opposite shore where Torquil MacLeod had his encounter with a large creature half out of the water. This was an official observation point and so we scrambled down the bank to get a better view. A man and his son joined us later and a conversation ensued about the "Quest" and the famous monster. Famous accounts attract sceptics and as with the McLean case, so it was with this account. Another sceptic has attempted to debunk this one as well.
After that it was a short drive to the layby near where Roy Johnston took a sequence of detailed photos back in 2002. We again made our way to the shore and scanned the area comparing it to one of the Johnston pictures for scale, distance and other similarities. The most frustrating bit was when a small boat appeared to our right approaching the spot where Johnston's creature surfaced. We waited in hope for it to cross over that spot for a good comparison shot.
But alas he turned and headed off in the wrong direction. I understand Alan might soon be taking to the loch waves with his own boat. I wonder how open he is to navigate anywhere we send him 😏? And, yes, you guessed it, Roy Johnston has also been targeted for debunking. Pressing on, we had a pit stop in Fort Augustus and made a brief visit to the official observation point at the pier there. It was here that an opportunity to speak on the accounts of Gregory Brusey and Alex Campbell presented itself.
But time was against us as I had to be back at the Loch Ness Centre by 5pm. So we drove onto Foyers to visit the Tim Dinsdale site. When we got there and I pointed out the loch, Dave was surprised how far away we were from the loch. Dinsdale stated he first spotted the object 1300 yards away, which is about three quarters of a mile. Below is a still from one of Dave's videos. We again took footage, sized up the problems involved and then took note that time was running out.
So it was a final stop at Dores and we checked out the photographic metrics of the Chie Kelly photos. More on that at another time and we got back to the Loch Ness Centre by 5pm where I would prepare for a Loch Ness Debate with Alan McKenna, Richard White and Jenny Johnstone as MC. Nessie fans may recall that Richard White took an interesting series of photographs back in 1997 (below).
The debate began with our short biopics and Richard White's account. Now I must admit I have not really covered Richard's photos on my blog, His account is certainly credible and I learnt more that evening than anything before. So I hope I may cover his picture sequence in more detail in a future blog. We certainly didn't discuss his pictures during the debate, mainly because no one asked about them!
That aside, we fielded questions on our opinions on the best photograph, the effect of hoaxes on research, what to do with a captured Nessie, funding for technology and so on. If you're wondering what we would do with a captured Nessie, we would record every square inch, get the DNA biopsy, attach radio tags and release back into the loch.
WEBCAM IMAGES
At the debate I noticed our webcamming friend, Eoin, was in the audience with his wife. After the debate we had a discussion on his recent activities. The webcam he usually watches was offline and we both did not know why at the time. I have encouraged him to try out the webcam at the Clansman as I think it is a better camera for resolution and position.
A week after that, Eoin emailed me with a four minute clip from the Clansman taken on the 9th July just before 8am. What appears to be one object with a small forward protuberance to the left and a longer disturbance behind moves slowly but uniformly from the far right to left (up the loch) before it moves out of range of the webcam (which pans across the Clansman parking area).
You can view the complete video clip here. What could it be? A floating branch with the tip at the front and some of it horizontal behind? The fact that it retains a regular distance between small and larger disturbance does indicate it being one object, which Eoin estimated at about 16 feet long and 100 yards out. Opinions are invited.
I also received some webcam images from Andrew Williams who took them from the Airanloch B&B webcam at Lochend about 7am on the 27th May, just three days before I arrived at the loch. It seems seven in the morning is a good time for webcamming. Andrew told me:
The object captured in the images was moving at quite some speed creating a well-defined wake. Looking at the distance from Webcam to the object I don't believe it to be a bird as it's two big plus the speed it was going would be much too fast for a bird. It reminded me of a torpedo with something dark just breaking the surface. I also captured what appears to be two objects swimming together?
There is no doubt the wake is being produced by an animal and Andrew discounts smaller creatures like birds. My first thought was whether it was an otter as they would be active around dawn, but there is nothing solid I can see that breaks the surface. The double object picture shown next does not appear to be connected to the wake and could be two small animals.
Andrew sent me two timestamped images which facilitated an estimate of wake speed. The first is above and the second below. Using the objects on the far shoreline as reference points, then one can produce an estimate of distance covered. How far out the wake is can be more of a guesstimate, but I will put it out halfway across the loch. So, the time lapse between the two images is 137 seconds and using the Google Map scale in the bottom right gives a distance covered of about 110m which gives a speed of 0.8 metres/second or 1.8 miles per hour. This is not very fast and could be achieved by a variety of aquatic objects.
The closer the wake is to the shore then the slower it will be and vice versa. The issue with all webcams is the same issue for all cameras and video equipment. We need to see something large and solid break the surface to take this further. That is what we all want and I thank Eoin and Andrew for their contributions. Keep up the hunt, people. You may be the person that captures that large object rising high and mighty from the depths!
Going back to the Quest, Alan then headed off on holiday to Loch Morar with his wife. I await his report from that trip! Meantime, Ashley, Dave and myself tried to find somewhere to eat about 9:30pm in Drumnadrochit. Not much chance of that, so we ended up with burgers and kebab in a local chip shop. Ashley was tired and called it a day after that and I gave her a final farewell and thanked her again for her heroic trip from all that way from Washington state.
With some energy left, Dave and I returned to the A82 road by Urquhart Castle for more infra-red watching till midnight. Dave rediscovered the IR option on his video equipment and that looked pretty good on the viewfinder display as you can see below. Apart from a bright heat spot on the far shore which we figured was perhaps a camp fire, it was finally off to bed.
SUNDAY 2ND JUNE
The next morning I packed up and had breakfast with Dave, discussing ways ahead. He had taken a good bit of video footage of which you have seen some stills here. We made some resolutions to investigate some items further (once we can afford it 😁) and with that I said my goodbyes to him. Hopefully, the Fellowship of the Hunt will meet again on the next Quest, if not sooner!
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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com
