nichepoetryandprose

Interesting and different weekend!!! I participated via webcam in The Quest, an effort to gather more information about the Loch Ness Monster. This was a weekend organized by The Loch Ness Centre. To add my bit to the effort, I stayed right at home and observed remotely.

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I watched the webcam at Lochend for 6 hours from 7:00 AM to 1:00 PM Atlantic Time (11:00 AM to 17:00 PM Scotland Time). It was not boring. This was partly because there was a lot to see: people on the opposite shore, birds and flocks of birds, sailing ships, speed boats, and cruisers, and a couple of things I couldn’t identify. I recorded my observations every 1 to 2 minutes and took some screenshots.

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Loch Ness is a long, narrow lake (27 km long) in the Scottish Highlands. The area where I watched is at Lochend, near Caledonia Canal, the northern outlet of the Loch. The webcam panned back and forth, showing the water and land between a long narrow beach to the north and a point of land to the south (near Dores).

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Most of the boat traffic I saw came from or went into the Canal.

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I quickly found, because the webcam moved on a pivot, I would not see a continuous sequence of events in any one area. For this reason, I divided the viewing area into four sectors (A, B, C, and D) so I could identify the sector where any particular action was occurring.

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The wind was blowing, so the water was choppy and riffled. The water of the Loch is also very reflective, so elements of the shoreline are reflected in the water. All of this means that waves appear long and thin, are constantly moving and appear darker near the shore — easy to make an observer think they have seen a long dark serpent-like monster.

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Some of the things I saw:

birds, individually or in flocks, on the water and in the air…

… ships of various types: sailboats, cruisers, speedboats and canoes…

… and people, in small groups, on the opposite shore, walking, swimming, canoeing, watching…

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I also saw two things I couldn’t identify. One was a dark ripple in the water of Sector B that moved northward for about 9 minutes and then disappeared. Another was a white, stationary blob that only appeared for about a minute, also in Sector B. I made photos of these for the Loch Ness Centre, but didn’t get photos of my own. I submitted these two and I understand I will eventually hear if they were observations of interest. Neither would win any prizes in the ‘looked like Nessie’ category!!!!

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All my best,

Jane

(a.k.a. Alexandra)