For a while this morning, we didn't think we were going to get to go on a cruise. They were originally going to go out at 11am, but there
wasn't enough people at that time (he said he wouldn't go if there was less than twelve people - which is fair enough, I guess, after all it
wouldn't be economical to run the boat at only £9 per person). But we hung around a bit (did some shopping - it's all we seem to be doing!)
and at 12 o'clock, there were some more people, so we went out after all. It was quite interesting, though the man said he'd seen Nessie
18 times since running the boat, so I wasn't too sure just how much of what he said I could actually believe :)
That said, I did manage to catch a glimpse of the monster - I even got it on camera! Though as you can see, it's a bit grainy and blurry - I was so amazed (and a little scared) and I couldn't keep the camera still... you know how it is. After all, the first person to catch a glimpse in recent memory was a professional photographer in the 1930's - he was so scared he dropped his camera! So you surely can't blame me if the professionals can't get it right either!
The guy on the boat also told us a story about this lady who drowned in 1929 after their boat exploded. Apparently, she was some rich woman,
and when she went down, she had some £30,000 worth of black pearls on. Anyway, they looked and looked, but weren't able to find her. The
husband put a reward on the recovery of her body - £30,000 in black pearls! But still nobody was able to find her. So, some 70 years later,
our entrepid captain had a look for himself, and using some advanced technology (submersible camera, I believe) he found the body! Not only
that, but he told us she was perfectly preserved by the cold water and the depth (some 150 metres or so). Now, he tried getting in contact with
their next of kin (apparently, that's the grand kids) but they never got back as to whether they want the body lifted. According to Scottish law,
ten years after notifying the next of kin, the body becomes public property, and the pearls she was wearing too. So he says he'll go back
in 2009 (he found it in 1999) and recover the pearls - worth some £16 million now!
Now, I may just be a skeptical tourist, but there's just something not quite right about his story. First of all, surely the grand kids know that £30,000 in 1929 would be worth a lot more now (whether it's £16 million or not - surely the pearls would have extra value because of the story attached to them), so why would they not want them back? Second, while the cold and deep water may have been enough to preseve a body, there's plenty of fish and eels in there - why haven't they eaten the body yet? And thirdly, if I'd found £16 million worth of pearls, I wouldn't go around telling some random group of tourists about it (he even mentioned the general area they were found in - it only took him two hours of searching after he'd found that general area before he found the body). I don't think you could trust that a random group of tourists would be as law-abiding as him - maybe one of us would just grab the pearls, dump the body back in and not mention it to anybody (though selling £16 million worth of pearls probably wouldn't go unnoticed...). I guess you just can't really trust everything a guy who claims to have seen Nessie 18 times says.
So, after the cruise, we went for a drive up the loch a bit. We stopped off at Urquhart Castle, which is about half way up the loch. It's
quite a spectacular castle, right on the shore of the loch. We arrived there at about 3:30pm, and the guy was just bringing the sign in -
even though it said it closed at 4:30, he told us that we only had about half an hour before the castle closed. Oh well, we thought, we won't
be back again (not for a while anyway!) so we may as well. So we went down to the castle. It's quite interesting, and they had a little film
in the gift shop about the castle's history (like most castles in scotland, it changed hands many times as it was besieged and so forth). Once
the film finished, the guy came in and told us, "OK, we're closing now, so if you could all make your way to the stairs..."
It seemed a bit rude, especially since it was only 4:15, but my mum and I made our way to the stairs. As we were going out, these two Japanese girls went up to the lady behind the counter - they wanted to buy something - but they were told "We're closing, that's why I've got all the money out!" which was rather un-called for I'd say. After all, they just wanted to buy something! When we got back out, my grandmother (who had waited for us in the car - too many stairs for her) told us that at least a dozen people had been turned away after we left before they were closing - all this before 4pm, even though it says on the door it closed at 4:30). All in all, I think the people running this castle were a little rude. I mean, it was quite obviously that they wanted to leave by 4:30, not close by 4:30.
Kind of a dissapointing end to a great day. I don't know if maybe it's just my mother and grandmother rubbing off on me though (they always seem to find something to complain about!)