Cool places to snorkel & swim with the pigs, giant salmon & nurse sharks
With autumn knocking at our doors some of us may have plans that are based around the sun and the sea.
Let’s take a look at world’s most famous snorkel spots with bizarre sea creatures – OK swimming pigs aren’t really sea creatures but stick with us and you will find out more.
Every year as the summer is closing its curtains and autumn looks out of the shades a huge influx of salmon migrates from the Pacific to the cold tenacious waters of Campbell River on the norther end of Vancouver Island of Canada.
These giant fish include chinook, Coho, pinks and sockeye are amazing growers, as the maximum length they could attain is the upward of four feet weighing more than 100 pounds. These fish arrive in the Campbell to lay around 300,000 eggs in the safe and clean water only to die later.
A local company Destiny River provides the visitors with an amazing tour of the deep water where swimmers face down in the middle of the action surrounded by thousands and thousands of swirling fish.
However, these are not the only creatures that you can have the honor of swimming with while in the deep, believe it or not, the list seems unending.
You may have heard of the off-grid guys or island survivors, but the residents of this Big Major Cay in Bahamas are not your usual tough knuckles, these are feral pigs who have now attained somewhat a celebrity status while they sun themselves on the sand and often dashing into the clear blue water of the Exumas.
When and how this family of twenty pigs arrived on the island is still a mystery, however, some suggest that the ancestors of these pigs must have survived a shipwreck off the island and these pigs managed to swim to the shore. The beautiful porkers drink from three freshwater springs and feast on the various treats left on the island by the visiting tourists, CNN.com reported.
The Bahamas is the ‘Official Home of the Swimming Pigs’. Visitors to the islands are happily embracing the unique and special experience of swimming with the pigs on the uninhabited island of Big Major Cay, which is home to these special creatures and affectionately called “Pig Beach”. The swimming pigs join the vast selection of aquatic activities already popular with visitors to The Bahamas, from snorkelling with tropical fish and sea turtles to shark and eel sightings to scuba diving says bahamas.com
But what about a live trailer of Jaws?
No one fancies anything that even remotely resembles an encounter with sharks especially in the vulnerability of deep waters, no matter how big a water enthusiast one may be. However, at Belize jumping down into the water alongside hordes of sharks happens many times in a single day.
The famous Shark Ray Alley lies between Caye Caulker and Ambergris Caye, this part of Mesoamerican Reef is considered the largest in the western hemisphere and is preserved under the Hol Chan Marine Reserve. Fishermen famously visited the Reef to clean their catch, but this attracted inordinate amounts of vicious and hungry sharks with some stingrays.
But there is a catch, most of these sharks look vicious but in fact are pretty harmless, though huge reaching up to 14 feet in length these sharks are called Nurse Sharks because of the suction sound these make while scooping up their prey from the bottom.
There are plenty of dive excursions companies to choose from and if you do go snorkeling with swimming pigs or anything else for that matter then please send us some pictures via our Facebook inbox – we would love to share them.