Photograph by Derek Colclough. Copyright 1987 loch-ness.org.
The best, and probably most famous search of all was "Operation Deepscan" in 1987. The idea was to sweep the whole length of the Loch with a sonar "curtain" from one end to the other. Nineteen cruisers lined up at the Fort Augustus end of the loch. Each boat was fitted with Simpson-Lowrance echo sounders. Following them was a faster boat, the "New Atlantis" fitted with a Simrad Scanning sonar. This boat was designed to home in on any contacts obtained by the flotilla. Tests were carried out in the Summer of 1986, to prepare for the full operation on the 9th and 10th of October 1987. During these two days, hundreds of TV crews and reporters were present from all over the world. Every hotel around the Loch was fully booked.
Three contacts were recorded on the first day. By the time the "New Atlantis" moved to these positions, the contact was gone. This was disappointing because they did not get a chance to track the contacts. On the other hand, the fact that the object had disappeared raised a few more questions. The technicians operating the sonar claimed one contact was larger than they had ever seen before in fresh water. This entered the sonar curtain 174 metres down and was tracked for 2 min. 20s. The New Atlantis marked this position with navigational equipment. The next day, five boats did an extensive search of this area to check for any inanimate objects. None were found. It was estimated later that the object could have been about 50 pounds in weight, quite a bit less that previous estimates that have put Nessie`s weight at around 2500 pounds. The second day provided no better results. Darrell Lawrance (of Lawrance Sonar) described the contact as "bigger than a shark, but smaller than a whale" He would not be drawn on what the contact might be.
At the press conference that night, journalists were disappointed no hard evidence was presented. Sonar print outs are not easily understood by the untrained eye, and therefore do not look very impressive on TV or newspapers, so the reporters did not have much to show.
Since then, there have not been any large scale investigations looking for Nessie. The Loch Ness project continues to do research at the Loch. There have been several video tapes of objects in the Loch and lots of eyewitness reports.
Updated 18th January 2001