Loch Ness Monster Explained

Chapter 5a - MONSTROUS - The Obsessed Mr. Shine

I have another important character who I now need to introduce properly – Adrian Shine, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

In the early nineteen-seventies he decided that he was going to solve the Loch Ness Mystery. Such was his single-minded determination that I believe he has achieved his objective and the factual side of this book deals with my interpretation of some of his discoveries.

The words "single-minded" are often overused and regularly abused but in Adrian's case they could be an understatement, as can be shown by his actions on his wedding day.

Back in the nineteen-eighties I was Best Man at Adrian's first marriage to Jane Mulvey. After the registry office wedding we decanted to the riverside near Inverness Castle for photographs to be taken by my brother-in-law, Derek Colclough.

Derek positioned us beside the river Ness in a very photogenic location and was just about to take the wedding pictures when Adrian looked towards the river.

Something had caught his eye.

"Look at me, Adrian", said Derek, peering into the viewfinder.

"No, no, no!", said Adrian.

"Look over there.", continued Adrian, pointing across the river. "There's a seal in the river. Forget the wedding pictures – take some pictures of the seal quickly."

Jane was not amused.

For now though, I need you to imagine this very British explorer-type who would not have been out of place in Livingstone's Africa – over six feet (1.8m) tall, well spoken, knowledgeable and very well read, with a beard which would be suited to an explorer entering Challenger's Lost World. One of his detractors calls him a Taliban look-alike.

Adrian was becoming frustrated with the direction of the American expeditions in the early seventies and had decided that using underwater cameras in Loch Ness was unlikely to achieve anything except the production of ambiguous photographs. The water of the loch was too peaty.

Peat is decomposed sphagnum moss built up in bogs surrounding Loch Ness over the ten thousand years since the last ice age. The loch's drainage basin is some 400 square miles and rainwater filtering through the dark brown peat, infuses the material. The result is that the water of Loch Ness is the colour of weak tea. Even worse, after heavy rain the loch's water can also carry a suspension of larger peat particles too. This means that flash photography produces results akin to driving through thick fog with headlights on main beam. You see nothing.

This photograph, taken with experimental 40,000 ASA film developed by Charlie Wyckoff of the Academy of Applied Science, shows a diver only a few metres away in the loch. It illustrates the problem admirably.

Not having the funding to use sonar machines (the only really effective tool for searching deep water), Adrian decided that it would be sensible to go somewhere with a similar tradition of a monster, but where the water was clear and a silhouette principle could be used with upward facing cameras. There was one place in Scotland which fitted the bill ... Loch Morar on the west coast near Mallaig. Its monster was called Morag. Loch Morar has a very small catchment area so there is no infusion of peat and the water running off the steep slopes is crystal clear.

To take advantage of this, Adrian built a home-made submersible which he named Machan, the Indian word for hide. It was built of fibre glass and was over one inch (2.5cm) thick with three quarter inch plate glass windows and a hatch on the top.

The plan was simple. Sit quietly at a depth, say of forty feet (12m) and look upwards. Anything passing above would be silhouetted against the surface brightness. No ambiguity – the mystery could be solved "at a stroke" to quote Adrian.

The operation of Machan was unsophisticated. It was baited with fish oil and linked to the shore with two tubes connected to a pump to provide a supply of air.

On one occasion the Project members were monitoring a dive. Adrian had just disappeared from view and, using on board ballasting systems, dropped to operating depth.

Fairly quickly Adrian realised he had a problem. For some reason there was no air supply. He returned to the surface and attempted to open the hatch. It wouldn't budge and the air appeared to be thinning rapidly.

What had happened was that someone on shore had connected the air pipe to the wrong side of the pump. Instead of blowing air into Machan, the pump was sucking air out.

You might, after a cursory examination of the principles, expect it to work equally well either way, but the outlet hose from Machan was made of a lighter weight material and when the pump started to suck, instead of allowing air inwards, the tube collapsed under the pressure of water and the pump began a relentless attempt to create a vacuum in the submersible. Adrian was in real trouble.

He pumped out ballast to bring Machan to the surface, but he was finding it increasingly difficult to operate the pump owing to the difference in air pressure and he could not open the hatch because air pressure from outside was keeping it sealed For emergencies there was a telephone and also a snorkel valve. Adrian opened the snorkel and was immediately shrouded in fog as the incoming blast of air atomised the water which had collected in the pipe. The equalised air pressure, however, allowed the hatch to be opened and the problem overcome.

Adrian had already been feeling faint and if he hadn't been alert to what was happening the incident could have been much more serious. If he had lost consciousness before coming to the surface no one would have known for some time.

What a near miss.

Machan was used again, but underwater remote control cameras took the human risk out of the silhouette method in the future, but this event certainly shows the pioneering nature of Adrian's personality. My belief is that he was born one hundred years too late.

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(C) 2018 Tony Harmsworth