Ocean Watch

I saw the Loch Ness monster. My sighting occurred during a recent bicycle ride through radiant heather fields in the Scottish Highlands, just above Loch Ness. I had stopped to admire the view and savor the scent of the blooming heather, and there was Nessie, looking exactly like she did in a picture I'd seen.

Sunshine in Scotland, fields of flowers, an aquatic monster ... Life just doesn't get better than that.

Not everyone has such a good time with the Loch Ness monster. The first person to see it was the missionary Saint Columba in 565 A.D. The story goes that when one of Columba's disciples swam across the lake (loch is Gaelic for lake), a monster appeared "with a roar and a great open mouth."

Columba made the sign of the cross and said to the monster, "Think not to go further, nor touch thou that man. Quick, go back."

The creature slunk back to the depths, and to this day has never again threatened anyone.

Monster reports from Loch Ness continued to trickle in through the centuries, but it wasn't until the 1930s that the public really got interested.

After several reported sightings in 1933, a London newspaper published the now-famous grainy photograph of a long-necked creature sticking up from the lake's surface. That picture triggered a search by a big-game hunter and a professional photographer, who eventually discovered a huge, bizarre footprint in the loch's shoreline mud.

This finding caused such excitement that believers actually built an iron-barred cage the size of a two-car garage. According to logic typical of that era, if a one-of-a kind creature lived in the loch, the thing to do was catch it and cage it.

But the footprint turned out to be a phony, made by a jokester with a dried hippopotamus foot. This odd tool was readily available since people in those days used hippo and elephant feet as umbrella stands.

The publicity this incident drew opened the door not only to doctored photos and silly hoaxes, but also to some real scientific research. In a lake 24 miles long, 1 mile wide and about 1,000 feet deep, this involved considerable effort, and little came of it.

Modern technology helped. In 1987, 24 motorboats equipped with sonar devices spent a week patrolling the loch in unison. This "Operation Deepscan" uncovered a population of arctic char (fish) previously undetected there.

The sonar echoes also revealed three large, unexplained objects. Some researchers suspect that these so-called objects were simply side echoes off the loch's steep walls.

Today, an impressive Loch Ness Monster museum sits on the banks of the lake in the charming town of Drumnadrochit. This high-tech museum gives an accurate scientific view of Loch Ness while keeping some of its mystery.

My Nessie sighting, it turns out, was motor ripples, which form near-perfect humps far from the boat when the lake is glassy calm, as it was that day. The museum's photos of such a wake look remarkably like a huge, undulating beast.

OK, I knew that. But seeing one of the ways people get tricked by this lake was fun.

All of Scotland was fun. Still, that first glimpse of Oahu from the plane's window gives me a thrill like no other. Coming home is even better than seeing the Loch Ness monster.