Does Your Insurance Cover Nessie?

Jacobite Cruises, which takes more than 100,000 tourists into the Scottish Highlands to visit Loch Ness each year, has bought a $1.5 million insurance policy against monster collisions for its entire fleet.

“I don’t know what the odds of this actually happening might be, but this is Loch Ness,” said company owner Freda Newton. “How silly would we look if it did and we weren’t covered for it?”

Towergate Moray Firth Ltd. in Inverness wrote the policy, which a company director called “probably the most unusual insurance request we have ever had.”

Reports indicate that the policy was signed on the 80th anniversary of the first reported sighting of the Loch Ness Monster, whom the locals affectionately call Nessie. Sightings have continued to be reported in recent years, including one in 2011 by a skipper who photographed a sonar image of a 5-foot-wide unidentified object that he said followed his boat for two minutes at a depth of 75 feet.

(Insert your own creepy music here.)

Learn more about the legend, including the “Nessie hunters” who have tried to prove the monster’s existence for decades, at www.nessie.co.uk.