Once again, it was off to Loch Ness for the fourth annual surface watch organised by the Loch Ness Centre. Travelling up the main Highland road towards Inverness on the last Friday of May, the first task on arriving at the loch was to collect a couple of trail cameras. This is not a Quest activity in and of itself and was rather my own ongoing private project.
In fact, the extended weekend could be described as the wider Quest project supplemented by other activities by the Loch Ness Exploration (LNE) group and those carried out by individuals such as myself. So, a left turn towards the south side of the loch took me towards the cameras. I had left them there since my last visit around Easter and so it was only about seven weeks since they were placed as opposed to the longer seven months over autumn and winter.
Having checked into my accommodation, I headed over to the Drumnadrochit Hotel to meet up with fellow LNE members. The first thing to catch my attention was not anything Nessie related, but a group of classic cars parked for the night. To be more precise, it was a fleet of Austin Healey cars on a tour of Scotland. Beautiful cars.
Having greeted the team, I was taken by Paul and Chris to see the latest and greatest LNE acquisition - The Explorer. As you can see from the image below, it is a boat bought a few months back and given an LNE makeover with a new coat of paint and some emblems added to it so that people know who this craft belongs to! Thanks to all involved in getting it into Loch Ness shape and I am glad to say it completed its maiden voyage the evening before I arrived.
May God bless her and all who sail in her as they say on these occasions! The hurling of a champagne bottle was not involved in this initiation. We would rather drink it. I didn't get a chance to go in it myself and indeed not at all for the duration, but perhaps next time. For now, the team have the kind permission of the pier owners to berth there whilst it is in use.
Moving on and after a dinner it was on to a staple part of these weekends and that was the midnight watch from Urquhart Bay. This is not quite a Quest event but anyone who has travelled up for that event is welcome to join the LNE team to watch the loch for what we believe is a creature which is mainly nocturnal.
The game plan is usually to lower a camera rig into the water at about 30 foot depth along with the hydrophone to potentially match up image with sound. The most interesting incident related to this search was that of last Halloween which was covered here. Others will contribute to the search with torches scanning the immediate vicinity for signs of activity while others will have night vision equipment trained on the surface.
In attendance was Chris Mitchell who does his own research of strange entities and UFOs in the North of England. We had chatted previously in 2022 when I did a podcast interview for the "TruthProof" website run by Paul Sinclair. The conversation resumed as we compared cryptid notes and Chris had some interesting photographs and videos from his own watches in the rural parts of Yorkshire.
Here at Loch Ness, I took a different approach this year with my theory of continuous scan mode. That simply means one records what is before them without necessarily observing at the same time. The more data that is collected, the higher probability of something being detected. The use I make of multiple trail cameras is one outworking of that idea and this night it was time to employ the FLIR thermal camera to the same end.
In this case, I pointed the FLIR to a point across the loch with the castle in view and let it run for the duration we were there. No need for me to keep looking into it apart from the occasional panning of the loch if something was pointed out by others. I reckoned based on the SD card file system inserted into the camera, it could record a 4Gb video file over two hours. Since this was my first long record use of the FLIR, lithium batteries as opposed to alkaline were required as I knew that they would not last that long. A snapshot of the video is shown below with the castle in the top right.
Two sessions were recorded over the weekend and will be examined along with the trail camera pictures in due course. Overall, nothing was observed on the surface, though I do not yet know about the results from the underwater camera rig. After finishing at about one in the morning, we headed back as the next day was going to be the busiest day. As an aside, some of the trail cam pictures were taken at night, though I am not sure of their value as they do no see very far past a few feet as shown below.
As you can see, it was stormy on that particular night but it makes for an energetic image. However, if the moon is across the loch (as below) then there is enough light to capture something, which would indeed be quite eerie if the beast (or anything unfamiliar) was swimming under the light of a full moon. Well, if the SD card doesn't fill up and the batteries don't drain, I may carry on with the night snaps. After all, we think Nessie is a nocturnal creature!
It was on to Saturday and the official Quest surface watch. We met in the Drumnadrochit Hotel restaurant as usual where we met Keely, a PhD student from Australia. She is over here in Scotland for over a month to not so much study Nessie, but those who study Nessie. She is doing a thesis on the sociological aspects of community amongst cryptozoologists. We were only too happy to help and took her with us on our varied jaunts around the loch as well as answering her questions on the world of Nessie hunters.
Various observation points were set up around the loch for people to conduct their watches. Dave and I got in my car and headed south from Drumnadrochit to the Altsigh observation point where we met up with Alastair who had his high powered binoculars set up on a tripod on the beach below the backpackers hostel. That was about a hundred yards from the river mouth where angler John McLean had his famous 1938 sighting. At the river we saw a modern day angler in his boat slowly approaching the estuary, so we shouted out a conversation as he stopped to fish.
Had he ever seen the beast of the loch? A question one naturally asks of someone who spends a lot of time on the water. He hadn't and said he fished not just this loch but other bodies of water across Scotland. He said the amount of catch at the loch had gone down significantly in his decades of visiting here. That we would certainly agree with and I have often wondered what the implication would be for an apex predator in the loch.
The conversation continued and then he told us there were currently three seals in the loch. Two were down at Fort Augustus and one at the mouth of the River Moriston. That I regarded as very useful information but not welcome information as seals in Loch Ness just confuse matters. People may mistake them for the real monster and sceptics just fall back on them as an explanation when all else fails. I had not heard of that many in the loch considering only one or two at most. I thought seals got shot to protect the salmon but apparently they don't do that now and so one protected species is gobbling up another!
We walked up to meet Alistair and another angler cruised by and so another conversation ensued with similar questions and answers. However, he said there was a seal seen at Urquhart Bay. I assumed that this seal was one of the three already mentioned. So, we headed down to Fort Augustus in order to see how easy it was to spot one of these seals compared to the trials of seeing a Nessie. We walked towards the Abbey side of the canal and had a coffee at the Boathouse Restaurant and watched the waters out towards Inchnacardoch Bay.
Seals are very active and typically are diving below for only minutes, although they can stay under for up to 30 minutes. A glimpse of a head or a back arching into the waters would have sufficed but nothing appeared and if one had put in an appearance, how long would it stay up for some photos to be taken? Either they were not there or spotting seals is no easy task either. At that point we changed direction and took a walk behind the old Abbey to see if anything was active at the mouth of the River Tarff.
It was quite a picturesque scene at the river as we made our way up it. The picture above is the view back up towards the loch. There were no seals here either but this spot brought to my mind a land sighting of the monster that is not so well known. It was back in 1975 and I quote from Rip Hepple's invaluable Nessletter from that period:
Early in October Mr.Rudolph Lipinski reported a very unusual sighting. He has been a lay worker at Fort Augustus Abbey for almost 30 years, during which time there have been a number of reported sightings by the monks. He was in the Abbey gardens which adjoin the River Tarff at about 6.30 p.m. when he heard loud splashing coming from the lower pool close to where the river enters Loch Ness. On running to the river bank he found himself only a few yards from a most extraordinary object; a large 'back' well clear of the water twisted around trying to free itself from the gravel bank it had apparently grounded on.
He watched it for two or three minutes before it freed itself and got into deeper water and then made off into the loch leaving a distinct wash. Mr Lipinski was interviewed by the local press, and several experienced monster-hunters. Tim Dinsdale noted with interest that the witness admitted to being reluctant to approach the bank too closely. When asked why, he said he was afraid it might 'attack'. The thing was very large and very much alive! so this was understandable.
Quite an experience and perhaps worthy of its own blog piece. I wonder how we would have reacted if we had encountered this large intimidating back twisting to be free? As you can see from the picture, it was raining and so we gave up on the seals and headed back to base as the Quest evening debate was approaching with myself on the panel as the believer, Dan Light (the sceptical one), Alan McKenna (trying to be as neutral as possible).
With a good sized audience asking the panel various questions, we thought it was possibly the best debate of the lot since the Quest series began. Dan was new to the panel and did a good job, adding a bit of grist to the mill to liven things up. If you want a good debate, you need a bit of friendly conflict and informed opinions bouncing off each other. Towards the end of the debate, some of the LNE team got up and walked out, but it was for a good purpose as they headed off towards Inverness.
Earlier in the day, we had a discussion with Alistair at Altsigh about the Surgeon's Photograph as he remains unconvinced about the Wetherell Hoax story. I admitted there were some questions that it would be good to find answers to and left it at that. After the debate, the LNE guys turned up with some stuff that Dick Raynor had kindly given them. The two main items are shown below being an original toy submarine as used by Christian Spurling to manufacture his fake Nessie and another done up in that fashion.
The team hope to do some experiments to see how easy it is to use this item according to the Wetherell Hoax story. Of course, these experiments were done in various forms back in the 1990s when the story first broke, but I am sure the guys will come up with some new angle on this. Just don't reproduce the moment when Wetherell submerged the toy with his foot into the loch bed when someone approached! After this, it was back out to the loch for another night watch.
The FLIR was set to continuous record again but the weather was a bit more foreboding this time. Before the rain descended about half past midnight, some of our intrepid team decided to go into the loch for a dip, not something I would readily do but we watched as they went into the loch at about a depth of 70 feet. People say the loch has a constant temperature close to 6°C, but that refers more to the deeper waters. At the surface it can go higher to 15°C but I imagine it was closer to 6°C that night!
I recorded the three swimmers on the FLIR camera as they showed up as a hot "red" signature on the viewer. Only their heads and arms were red as anything under the surface was wiped out by the water layer. Fortunately they did not turn blue as one thought about the dangers of hypothermia! One speculated as to what the Monster would look like through the same device, but with no visual or sonar hits that night, we headed back to our beds for a well earned sleep.
And so I came to my last day at the loch on Sunday. Once I had checked out of my accommodation and headed to the centre, there was a series of exhibition stands at the Loch Ness Centre and one was run by the LNE team. There was a raffle but I did not win either of the two bottles of whisky, just a can of Irn-Bru! However, there was a bonus to come as some of us headed back to Fort Augustus to speak to Shaun Sloggie, who photographed an interesting sonar hit from one of the boats owned by Cruise Loch Ness back in 2024 (see link).
Once we found him, he kindly invited onto the next cruise outing for free. While on board we listened to his discourse on the Loch Ness Monster to the assembled passengers and then he privately invited questions from us about his 2024 encounter. We put to him various questions and I asked in general about the debate concerning what would constitute a good "monster" sonar hit. By that, I meant a sonar image which could not readily be fobbed off with the usual reflection and refraction explanations.
I think the quality of today's sonar should exceed such ambiguities and Shaun's library of images over the years could be a valuable database in finding out what is explicable in order to finally leave that which is inexplicable. For example, I asked about seals and Shaun showed me a saved image of one such animal hit. We were also shown other images which I think require more than just the usual explanations.
While there I asked him about the subject of underwater channels which I had addressed in a recent article. Before that, Shaun suggested there may be a kind of cave entrance further up the loch which bore further investigation. At that point I thought of Craig Wallace who was up at the loch trying out one of those sonar torpedoes that look terribly useful. I have nothing to report on how he got on but I summarized to Shaun what Herman Cockrell had theorized about such channels and I hope to discuss it further with him.
The pictures above are from the wider sonar view that the cruise ship displays. Cockrell speculated that the entrance to his proposed subterranean river was around the centre of the second photograph. However, Shaun thought that the lower resolution on this display was probably not enough to define such a feature on the loch walls. All in all, it was an interesting trip and LNE hope to contact Shaun for further discussions.
With that over, I headed back to base and said my farewells to everyone. Thinking about the PhD that Keely was researching, where were we between the small communities we see in old village fairs or a simple aggregate of individuals? Perhaps we were like that Austin Healey classic car club that stopped by Loch Ness? They have their car and we have our monster. Maybe classic car club members just talk about spark plugs and carburetors? We don't talk about classic Nessie sightings all the time (well, I might).
Whatever the answer, Nessie hunting, like many other activities is a fulfilling venture at multiple layers. But so far this year, we have not had the pleasure of Nessie's company, such as when the trail camera captured that single hump back in June. So life carries on back home ... as I now turn my attention to the next World Cup game!
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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com
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