.SPORTING CLIVE GAMMON
At Achnahannet, a couple of miles down the road from Urquhart Castle on the northern shore of Loch Ness, there is a small cluster of caravans painted Local Authority green, some vans treated similarly and a wooden platform built out over the edge of the hill, bearing a movie camera on a tripod. When I was there early this month it was in- operative, being draped with drying towels, shirts and other garments. No one stood by it, for there was still a week to go before the official Watching season began. However, in a wooden but at this HQ site of the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau Ltd, sales were brisk of pamphlets and books describ- ing the Bureau's work and prints of historic photographs of the, er, phenomenon.
A quiet, almost domestic scene which will become more lively no doubt through the rest of the summer as six further cameras, giving 90 per cent coverage of the Loch's surface, are brought into play. But already there is some unease amongst the skeleton staff presently in residence. Since 1962, the sporting rights, so to speak, of Loch Ness have been held by the Bureau without any outside challenge. But a publicity stunt con- ceived by the London PRO of Cutty Sark
whisky ('Nobody knows about us over here, but were No 1 in the States') shows signs of cutting across their virtual monopoly and they are getting quite cross about it.
The prize that Cutty Sark is offering for the capture, alive, of the Loch Ness monster is a huge one—a million pounds. And one might be forgiven for thinking that such an incentive would be pleasing to the Bureau whose object, presumably, is to solve the mystery of the monster once and for all. A lot of chaps going after it would help them enormously, you'd think.
Ah, no. 'The rules do say that the monster has to be captured alive,' a Bureau watcher admitted to me, 'but consider this. What if a breeding hull was netted out? He could be the only one in the herd.'
The astonishing thing is the way, one finds oneself being carried along by this kind of talk. Easily, conversationally, not only a monster has been assumed, but a whole herd with bulls, cows and, one supposes, calves. .(An old lady in Drumnadrochit has already appealed to monster-hunters to keep away from the shallows 'because that's where the babies are'.) Just anyone coming up and hav- ing .a dabble could wreck years of patient work, the Bureau implies, as if protecting the monster were as real and concrete a task as saving the Arabian oryx or the eggs of the Scottish osprey. The ecological lobby has had us all transfixed for the past few years, and not a bad thing either. But this must be, even though unwittingly, its greatest triumph, that a row should break out over the protection of a creature that no one has managed to prove exists.
Mr Russell Taylor, the Cutty Sark man who started all the trouble, has encountered other problems than the conservationist one. The million pound prize has been covered by Lloyd's at a premium of a little under £10,000, but the QC employed to draw up the competition rules pointed out that there was a certain contingency which, if unprovidcd for, could leave Mr Taylor's company still liable for a million.
If it should happen, pointed out this shrewd legal brain, that. two competitors should simultaneously catch a monster apiece, then as the rules stood two separate millions would have to be paid out. So they are hastily being reframed to take care of this.
Meanwhile, back at the Loch, no hunters were in evidence on 1 May, opening day in the Cutty Sark competition though media men, including a Japanese camera crew, were on the watch for them—the hunters, not the monster, of course.
So far this season, sightings have been sparse, and no doubt serious sportsmen arc hoping for the kind of weather that made for a good watching season in 1968—an anti- cyclone for preference with long, sunny, calm periods. High winds, channelled up the Loch, are inimical to sport. Not only do they make viewing difficult, but the monsters don't seem to like them sweeping over their exposed backs, according to one Bureau authority.
In the public bar of the Drumnadrochit Hotel, gathering place of local experts, there was some cynicism about a positive result this summer. But there were rumours of a man down Fort Augustus way that had a plan. The underwriters and the Bureau would no doubt hope that it is a feeble one.
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