Early on Friday 29th May, it was a three hour drive from Edinburgh up to Loch Ness. After picking up a couple of cameras left at the loch over the Summer, I made my way over to "base camp". Since the first organised "Quest" by the Loch Ness Centre just over two years ago, a small band of like minded people had been growing and meeting together to do a bit of "monster hunting".
The camp was a knot of three tents north of Invermoriston occupied by four fellow Glaswegians (Chris, Paul, William and Alastair) and local man Jared with his daughter. We were later joined by Dave from Birmingham and LNE (Loch Ness Exploration) leader, Alan MacKenna. Matty and Aga would later join us along with two Australian Nessie fans, Callum and Kyra. So, a good little group to get some Nessie work done.
Having ascertained respective Glasgow football team allegiances with Paul, Chris and William with the ensuing chat and banter, we went down to the shore from the encampment to check out the shoreline. Now this beach differed somewhat from other shorelines I had explored at the loch as it had this older protrusion of rock jutting out from the usual shingle.
This is where some qualified geologist would explain what kind of rock this is and its possible origins. I must do an introductory course on geology. Anyway, we resolved to come back during the night hours and do some thermal camera work. Before this, YouTuber Ellie Whitby had arrived with her filming assistant, Anna. They were going to record some of our research and shenanigans over the weekend for a future video presentation.
Now I have to say that Alan has a thing about standing waves and has been looking to get some decent video footage of one making its way down the loch. Some eyewitnesses have been fooled by this phenomenon, the debate is over how much they have. While we awaited Alan's arrival at the camp, we saw one such wave forming and travelling. It required the presence of two RIB speed boats making their way down the loch in parallel at a good pace. You can see it to the centre left in the frame capture below.
Note also the lattice pattern of the water between the wave and trees indicating a classic area of constructive and destructive wave patterns from two vessels (below). As the boats passed us and they were neck and neck, the standing wave actually formed between them and for a short time proceeded with them before going into reverse and heading in the opposite direction to the boats. Once the boats were out of sight and sound, it persisted for a short time and one could imagine that a person who just turned up at that point would be puzzled by it.
The giveaway was obviously the boats, but in their absence it would have been the lattice wave patterns which betrayed a prior confluence of boat wakes as well as the lesser waves that accompanied the main standing wave. A standing wave is not a standalone wave, it moves in the midst of clues to indicate its true nature. The height to length ratio of this wave also falls far short of the higher Nessie humps reported by eyewitnesses.
Alan did turn up just as the standing wave died out - that is almost as bad as turning up just to see Nessie submerge in a mass of disturbed water! Well, we know when and where the speed boats passed and since they are daily commercial boats, Alan may yet see a second show. Now, after heading into Drumnadrochit to check into my accommodation and dinner, it was back to the shoreline at night time.
Heading through the torchlit undergrowth to the shore, it was pitch dark out on the loch without the help of the FLIR thermal camera. Nothing was stirring in the loch but the darkness allowed magnificent views of the Milky Way straddling the sky above as well as some shooting stars. There was also some strange effects of the clouds over to the south lighting up in the direction of Whitebridge, but it wasn't lightning and was more like someone had briefly flashed a big searchlight from somewhere beyond the hills.
There was also some flashing lights on the opposite shoreline, but that was deduced to be some equipment left at a construction site. Before then, I had recalled Paul Devereux's "Earth Lights" for those that remember him. All told, it was an interesting night of observations but no monster appeared in the sight of any thermal device.
Come Saturday morning, Adrian Shine was around and some of the group wanted to meet him for the first time. I can't remember how many times Adrian and I had met for a chat, but there is always something new to discuss, so I made my way over to the Drumnadrochit Hotel. We had a good chat and a few copies of his recent Sea Serpent book were visible for signing by him. We had a discussion about the earliest Nessie publications as Adrian was doing some research into the people of that period.
That primarily involved publications from the now defunct Fort Augustus Abbey and a man called James Carruth and his 1938 booklet on the creature. To Adrian's surprise I mentioned an earlier Abbey booklet called "The Mysterious Monster of Loch Ness" from 1934 by a different author. The one Abbey book that we both would have loved to have seen was the one that another monk by the name of Cyril Dieckhoff would have published if not for his untimely death. A proportion of that work subsequently appeared in Constance Whyte's book, "More Than A Legend". What is not clear is how much of that work appeared in her book.
A discussion on sonar ensued as Adrian is the local expert on that and monster aspirations for its use. He emphasised the need for calibrating sonar devices used at the loch to better estimate what a contact may be showing. That I had realised, but the question I had for him was to confirm that anything below a boat and its sonar to a depth of up to ten metres is effectively invisible to the sonar. He confirmed this but thought up to a depth of five metres was more accurate. Can the monster swim just below the surface with impunity to blinded sonar devices? Now there is something to think about!
However, the news from the campsite was that the Glasgow boys had had an unusual experience after we had all left for bed the night before. About 2AM, they were chatting away with a drink or two in hand when a huge splashing noise startled them from the shoreline down below. Not surprisingly, they were not too keen to go down and investigate the matter. Before anyone begins to think about the hallucinatory properties of alcohol, one of the chaps is teetotal.
This required some investigation and later we were back at the shoreline. There was nothing around that could be connected with the noise but if it had occurred further out in the loch, nothing probably should have been expected. Either way, we had our alcohol-averse colleague sit where they had been at night while we tossed various rocks into the water down below. We would then get his response from above as to how that sounded compared to the "big splash".
The first moderately sized rock we tossed in, he did not hear it from the tents. A larger one of about 10kg he did hear but it was a lot quieter than the 2AM noise. We stopped there realizing we needed Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime to throw something larger a sufficient distance into the loch to take this experiment further.
So what caused the noise? If one was of a sceptical disposition, then a nearby illegal fly tipper getting rid of commercial rubbish would probably be suggested. Now people throwing rubbish down the slopes of the loch is a problem, but this is more of a simplistic solution than a simple one. The first issue is the location as the loch shoreline is a fair distance from the road which suggests getting heavy duty items like a fridge from a van to the "tipping point" is a bit of an arduous task.
Secondly, anything tipped over would not hit the loch due to the presence of the beach below to arrest its fall. Indeed, the loch tends to gradually begin as shallow before it hits the underwater ledge a fair distance out. In other words, any fridge being tipped over is much more likely to greet unsuspecting people with a rocky crash than a mighty splash.
Now there are spots where it is more or less a sheer drop into the depths such as by the Horseshoe Scree. But that spot would be over 3 miles away to the south of the camp. A boulder rolling down into such a spot cannot be totally discounted, it is just that big boulders generally have not moved from their spot for thousands of years and it would take a major earthquake to shift them! So maybe it was our monster, but we shall never know for sure.
After this, it was time for some more experimentation of a more complex variety as Alan had put together an underwater camera device to try out near the castle. So as darkness once again descended, we drove north to that area. The waters found were sufficiently deep and accessible to lower the contraption into the water. It was baited with some fish innards to entice anything over to the vicinity of the camera.
This wasn't just a matter of trying to photograph the whites of Nessie's eyes. It was to prove the technology and see how it could be improved. Also, with the filming of a pike nearby in May, the recording of these relatively large creatures would have also been a good outcome. However, nothing of note was recorded in the short time it was submerged. A further attempt will be made in a future visit to the loch. The thermal cams were out again but nothing significant was recorded there either (below).
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The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com
