Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
I SNAPPED LOCH BEST MONSTER
Honeymooner wins Nessie contest
NEWLYWED Rebecca Stewart scooped a monster cash prize after taking this ‘snap of Nessie’ while on her honeymoon.
She spotted something fishy in the water while at Loch Ness in the Highlands with husband Paul and their two-year-old son Thomas.
Her image was accepted by the Loch Ness Monster sightings register and it won an annual £1,500 cash prize for Best Nessie Sighting.
Rebecca, of Oldham, Greater Manchester, who was recently made redundant as a social housing officer, said: “It’s amazing. I saw something really strange – it was hard to tell the size. Birds near it looked very small.”
“We were on the pier and the thing was near what looks like a boathouse. Birds would fly near it and quickly fly away from it,” she said in her report.
“A boat came from the canal and it disappeared. We didn’t have binoculars but I used my iphone to take photos.” Mrs Stewart’s father and stepfather have recently moved to the Loch Ness area and she plans to visit again soon. “We love it – the scenery, everything and I will be keeping a lookout.”
Gary Campbell, keeper of the register of sightings, said: “Rebecca is a worthy winner. She was one of eleven sightings last year, a record for this century. She won in a competition with four pieces of video evidence.” Rupert Adams, of William Hill who sponsor the prize, said: “This is the twentieth year we’ve been running the competition and the quality of entries has shown Nessie is alive and well.”
Irish missionary St Columba is said to have encountered a beast in the River Ness in 565AD. Since then there have been 1,080 logged sightings, including a famous 1934 hoax. Professor Neil Gemmell, of New Zealand’s University of Otago, plans to look for traces of unusual DNA by gathering water samples from the loch.