Loch Ness Monster Explained

Chapter 16b - THE MONSTER - 24 Hour Sonar Patrols

The year Adrian Shine and his Loch Ness and Morar Project returned to Loch Ness was 1979. The year before I staged the Loch Ness Monster Exhibition.

Adrian had also thought of setting up an exhibition. With Ricky Gardiner he had produced a small exhibit in a room in the Great Glen Exhibition in Fort Augustus, but the owner, Bill Owen, did not like the fact that people paid to come into his folklore exhibition but made a bee line to the monster room and ignored everything else.

This kindly gentleman, who later went on to become a friend, had been a teacher at the Abbey School and was keen to promote the heritage of Fort Augustus. He saw the monster as a distraction from this and even went so far as to remove all mention of the monster from all of his signs and advertising material. The result was that even fewer people sampled the delights of his prehistoric, Celtic and Caledonian Canal exhibits ... and he was losing money.

[The above paragraph was written long before the news that the Abbey school was a hotbed of paedophiles. I later discovered that the "kindly gentleman" was one of the ringleaders! It just goes to show that you cannot trust anyone. Well, he died a very painful death from cancer so he got his just desserts. Evil bastards!]

Adrian was keen to see what I had done with the monster story in Drumnadrochit and, with Ricky Gardiner, he came to visit. We had not met at this time and, frankly, I hadn't heard of him which will give readers an idea how many gaps there were in my research.

The story of Adrian and Ricky's friendly scheming to bring me on board with the Project is detailed in "My Monster" in chapter eight, as is the account of the co-operation which went on to develop between exhibition and expedition.

Adrian's failure to succeed with underwater cameras and sonar in Loch Morar inspired him to discover a far better way of deploying cameras. Part of that work would be to build up a behavioural pattern for the phenomena in Loch Ness. If there really were animals in the loch, then presumably they had habits and feeding patterns which could be observed using sonar.

In 1981 the John Murray (image at top of page) was built by the Project. It was named for the man who conducted the first hydrographic survey of the loch in 1901 using a wire depth sounder.

The vessel was constructed from building strength plywood. The main framework was to be lashed to forty foot inflatable pontoons. The superstructure was to contain bunks for twenty-four hour operation, a work station equipped with scanning sonar and linked to a colour video sounder. There would be a raised bridge forward so as to cause the vessel to be able to drift silently with the wind after dagger boards were deployed aft. Power was to be provided by a Ford Anglia petrol engine with a long propeller shaft to keep its disturbance well clear of the sonar transducer. The construction provided a boat which was extremely manoeuvrable and capable of turning within its own length. In the event the Loch Ness and Morar Project was unable to make use of the ability of the vessel to drift silently all of the time owing to the drain on battery power and that they were at the mercy of the wind direction at least fifty percent of the time. By recharging spare batteries at the base camp, however, it remained a useful addition to the research armoury.

The hook-up between the two sonar machines was crucial.

The scanning sonar would scan around the vessel and the beam could be tilted up and down. Although the scan could cover 360o, the plan was, normally to just sweep to and fro in a forward direction covering from 45o left to 45o right at a downward tilt also of about 30o to 45o. The screen of this machine was circular (picture opposite).

The beam is pointing backwards in the photograph and, half way along the beam a clear horizontal line can be seen. This is the bottom of the loch.