Nessie, is that you?
A British outdoorsman paddling through Scotland’s Loch Ness for a long-distance charity canoe trip may have inadvertently captured drone footage of the fabled Loch Ness Monster.
“The last thing I want to do is make a Nessie claim,” Richard Mavor told The Post. “I’m the most skeptical of people. But watching this I think yeah, there’s something a bit strange here.”
The video image taken last month of a long, thin form just beneath the water’s surface was so fleeting that Mavor, 54, didn’t notice it when he posted it Sept. 1.
He created two lengthy videos to chronicle a four-day, 62-mile paddling expedition that raised 15,000 pounds (about $20,560) for the Alzheimer’s Society charity and posted them to his YouTube channel, Richard Outdoors.
On Day 3, when the group pulled their canoes up in a remote spot on the south shore of Loch Ness for the night, he sent a camera-equipped drone aloft to capture a shot of the group.
As the camera zoomed in, the outline of a creature nearly twice the length of the beached 14-foot-long watercraft appeared to approach the group while floating beneath the lake’s rippling waves.
A week later, commenter Steve Bates called the image to Mavor’s attention.
“4 mins waters edge, the ripples look like Nessie,” Bates wrote.
“Must be a trick of the light/waves,” Mavor responded.
But after looking at his footage more closely, he began to have second thoughts.
“The more I watch it I think, ‘Crikey!’” Mavor told the Daily Record. “There really wasn’t anything in the area that could be.”
“I had to rewind and fast-forward several times,” Mavor told The Post, recalling that he had seen no driftwood or other large objects in the water.
“That’s what’s confused me. It’s an inland water, you don’t get tidal debris like you do on the coast,” he said. “Things do wash up, but nothing the size of this.”
Reports of a mysterious monster in the depths of the deep lake date back hundreds of years, with the earliest claims made in the 6th century.
And the shape captured by Mavor’s camera bore an uncanny resemblance to a plesiosaur — a sea creature from the dinosaur-dominated Mesozoic era that has long been associated with the elusive Nessie.
In fact, Mavor’s group was traveling with a bright green stuffed Nessie toy to serve as the expedition’s mascot.
“We called it the ‘Nessie Award’ and handed it to the person who made the biggest fool of themselves on the day,” Mavor said. At the time he shot the drone footage, the miniature monster was riding along in the bow of his canoe.
“Maybe the real Nessie just wanted to get a closer look,” he said.