"Actually, no …" My voice trailed off, an acorn of thought planting itself in my subconscious, its growth instantly retarded by the squawk of Brandy's loudspeaker. "Sorry to interrupt, Dr. Wallace, but if everyone would look to starboard, you'll see Achnahannet. Back in the sixties, this small village was the location for the Loch Ness Phenomenon Investigation Bureau. It was also in these waters that the famous speedboat racer, John Cobb, died tragically in 1953 when he attempted to break the world's water speed record."

"Was it the monster that killed him, Dr. Wallace?" This from a thin American woman sporting a dozen painful-looking body piercings.

"Well, Miss—"

"Johnston. Dena Johnston. It was Nessie, wasn't it?"

"Tell me, Dena, which of the two is more likely, that an ancient creature rose up from the Loch and struck the boat, or that John Cobb simply lost control when his speed surpassed 240 miles an hour?"

"I don't know, the speed, I guess, but it's still possible, right? I mean, I've seen photos taken underwater, photos that clearly show the monster's flipper. How can you deny that?"

"Unfortunately, the famous photo you're talking about was not Robert Rines's original, it was an enhanced version, created by an ambitious graduate student working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. It was his digital signal scanning process that fleshed-out the flipper effect, not Rines's original negative."

A heavy silence took the boat, the passengers obviously disappointed with having me shoot holes into the Loch Ness legend.

Brandy quickly attempted to lighten the mood. "Hey, folks, Invermoriston on our right, look at Invermoriston. The hamlet's surrounded by a dense forest known as the—"

"Not so fast, Dr. Wallace." An American wearing a University of Iowa T-shirt raised his hand. "James Keigan, I do a lot of freelance writing on the Internet, my blogs deal with the unexplained. After doing extensive research, I happen to agree with the experts that claim Nessie's a plesiosaur."

Nods of agreement.

"Okay, James, since you've done so much 'extensive research,' maybe you could explain to us how a plesiosaur, a prehistoric aquatic reptile that went extinct 65 million years ago, is still living in a freshwater Loch."

"First, plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs used to live in the area of the North Sea. Do you deny that?"

"No denial here."

"And do you deny that Loch Ness was once open to the North Sea, prior to the last ice age?"

"Technically, Loch Ness still flows into the North Sea, but the depths of the River Ness are far too shallow to conceal something as large as a plesiosaur."

"I know that, but isn't it possible an undiscovered underwater passage might still exist, linking the North Sea to Loch Ness?"

"That's theory, not fact. Even so, you still haven't used your extensive research to show me how a colony of air-breathing plesiosaurs managed to escape extinction to inhabit Loch Ness without anyone actually seeing them."

"I never said it was a colony. Could just be a few survivors."