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Searches of the water
Expeditions and later searches
Boats, echo sounders and, later, a BBC sonar sweep. The interesting contacts from 1987 were not identified, and they were not claimed as a 10-metre animal.
The Loch Ness Project’s own account of Operation Deepscan, in 1987, says twenty vessels from Caley Cruisers of Inverness were equipped with Lowrance echo sounders and formed a slow-moving front line.1
Sources differ. The Loch Ness Project says twenty vessels took part in Operation Deepscan. BBC On This Day called it a flotilla of 24 boats. Both accounts agree that three sonar contacts were of interest, and the Project says those contacts remain unexplained.
BBC On This Day, reporting the end of the 1987 search, called Deepscan “a flotilla of 24 boats” that picked up three sonar “contacts,” shown as crescent-shaped marks, in the waters below Urquhart Castle — possibly a seal or a group of salmon.2 When interesting contacts were revisited, most proved to be fixed, but three had disappeared. The Project says they were “certainly not 10 metre monsters,” yet were stronger than fish echoes and lay far deeper. “The contacts remain unexplained.”1
Later work by the Project completed the first quantitative acoustic estimates of the open-water fish population and found only about 20 tonnes.1
In July 2003, the BBC says, programme-makers carried out what it calls the most extensive search yet, using 600 separate sonar beams and satellite navigation technology, but found nothing.2
The 2003 search is a later check, not a settling of every earlier report. It is also a reminder that a large, well-equipped sweep can come back empty.
The 2019 DNA survey used a different method: not a picture of a shape in the water, but traces left by living things.