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Canadian Geographic
"A Fish called Andrew" by Andrew Findley
"There is no better time or place to see Pacific Salmon than when they return to spawn in native rivers….today I am among one of the fortunate few who will enjoy a close-up look at these creatures in their habitat."
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Time Magazine
"All about salmon"
by Valerie Marchant
"You can swim with them in Campbell River, or watch a bear eat one in Knight Inlet. Just as supportive as the staff at Knight Inlet were those at Paradise Found Adventure Tours (www.paradisefound.bc.ca), where I swam with the salmon."
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The New York Daily News
"Canada Spawns a Hit, the Salmon Safari"
by Michael McKinley
"Campbell River is more than just a salmon lover's fantasy….Campbell River is quite possibly North America's finest civilization-meets-wild-life destination."
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 Waters Magazine
"Global Waters"
"Snorkelling With…Salmon?"
by Jim Eidt
"Welcome to the Campbell River on Vancouver Island, where the amateur ichthyologists are in season. They have come for the salmon."
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Outdoor Canada Magazine
"101 Things You Gotta do Before You Die"
by Dre De
"Closer to shore I noticed several lures lodged in rocks…but such hazards were far outweighed by the thrill or sharing the water with these magnificent fish making their final journey home."
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 Outside Magazine
"Communing with Nature"
by Mike Randolf
"An adventure travel outfitter spawns a new trend."
"After stuffing my appendages into a neoprene wetsuit tight enough to defeat Houdini, I cinch up my mask, bite down on my snorkel, and belly flop into the icy current of Vancouver Island's Campbell River."
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The Floridian
"The Canada Issue"
by Eric Lindberg (syndicated)
"Hundreds of salmon stream by on their way upriver, parting like crowds on a packed sidewalk to let me through….I imagine that I'm drifting on a ceiling of a great underwater cathedral…"
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 Outdoor Explorer
"A River Runs with Them"
by Catherine Buni
"It is both less dramatic and more stunning than I'd imagined, this swimming with salmon. For one thing, I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I've never snorkeled whitewater before - who has? - and my guides have been leading this trip for only a few years."
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West Jets INFLIGHT" magazine
"Snorkeling Campbell River, Face to Face with a Salmon"
by Ken Donohoe
"It may not be as warm and coluourful as snorkeling in the Caribbean or Australia, and you will have to suffer the momentary embarrassment of wiggling into an unflattering suit, but snorkeling with salmon on the Campbell River is like no other underwater experience. And besides, you soon realize the salmon don't really care what you look like."
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 The National Post
"Running with the Lunkers"
by Cleo Paskal
"I Am One With the Salmon."
"I have seen the bubbling thrash of white water from below. I have flowed silently over elegant mosaics of multi-coloured river stones. My shadow has darkened the laser beams of sunlight that pierce the surface of the water."
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The New York Times
"Heading Home, Salmon Have Some Company"
by Bruce Grierson
"The annual salmon spawn really is one of those mysterious, natural spectacles worthy of the build up."
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Sunday Tasmanian
"Swimming with the Salmon"
by Leigh Winburn
"Streaking downstream and passing the biggest salmon imaginable as they flash just past your face mask soon has you wanting to keep going back for more."
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Time Magazine
"All About Salmon"
by Valerie Marchant
"You can swim with them in Campbell River, or watch a bear eat one in Knight Inlet. Just as supportive as the staff at Knight Inlet were those at Paradise Found Adventure Tours (www.paradisefound.bc.ca), where I swam with the salmon. The opportunity to get up close and personal with salmon was high on my agenda for this trip, because most of the animals I would see depend for their survival on these fish.
As the sun set on Campbell River on Vancouver Island I drifted with the current through clear water. Because my guide, Jamie Turko, was so determined to protect me, I could totally focus on one of nature's mysteries: the journey of Pacific salmon to reproduce and die in the spot where they were born. Would that the salmon had done so well: some of the hundreds that slipped past me were so bashed up by obstacles encountered on their journey that I was astonished they were still swimming." 
Waters Magazine
"Global Waters"
"Snorkelling With…Salmon?"
by Jim Eidt
"Welcome to the Campbell River on Vancouver Island, where the amateur ichthyologists are in season. They have come for the salmon. While the less adventurous cling to the safety of the river bank to observe salmon returning to their birthplace to spawn, the hardy few don wetsuits and masks, stuff a snorkel in their snout and, accompanied by a professional guide, float face-first down the river, getting an up-close-and-personal look as the salmon struggle for home beneath them. They float downstream. They watch the fish go by. After a couple of kilometers, they get out.
Hard to imagine only one company is plying these moving waters, but Paradise Found Adventure Tours remains the only salmon snorkeling operator in the world. Proprietor Catherine Temple says the activity may seem strange to some, but her clients are genuinely moved by the experience. We've had people coming out of the river crying, she says.
This season was the company's third. Business was up 300 percent, as scores of tourists counted out the $68.00 fee, pulled on wet suits and inched into the chilly river water to chum around with the five species of salmonids. Depending on the time of year - the Campbell River eco-tours are offered between July and October - the snorkellers can expect to spot sockeye, coho, chum, Chinook and lots of pink salmon passing under them. Temple says the fascination is very much unrequited. The salmon are absorbed in the job of getting home to spawn and generally ignore the drifting tourists gawking at them from above.
Temple expects business to keep growing, particularly the international side. She says she had visits from more than two dozen foreign media. People like the idea of no-impact observation."
Outside Magazine
Communing with Nature
"An adventure travel outfitter spawns a new trend"
by Mike Randolf
"After stuffing my appendages into a neoprene wetsuit tight enough to defeat Houdini, I cinch up my mask, bite down on my snorkel, and belly flop into the icy current of Vancouver Island's Campbell River. I'm here with 11 other customers who have each shelled out $47 for the chance to float facedown through rapids and bounce off rocks among hundreds of bronze sided, migrating coho headed the other way. The schools part and then close behind us in the murk, hardly noticing our frogman flotilla. Forget swimming with sharks-here, on the only fish-watching adventure tour of its kind in North America, I've become one with the salmon.
Snorkeling among the Campbell's salmon runs first started in the 1950's when Canadian nature writer Roderick Haig-Brown wrote Measure of a Year, which described his own experience swimming with the fish. But in the past two years, guided trips have proven especially popular. By my second year, business jumped 300 percent, says Catherine Temple of Paradise Found Adventure Tours, which started the salmon excursions in 1997. Last year it went up another 300 percent. And this year it will be even bigger.
From July through October, Temple runs two trips a day, packing her clients into a van and whisking them three miles upriver, providing mini-seminars on marine biology along the way. At different times of the year, the Campbell hosts all five species of Pacific salmon: Chinook, coho, chum, sockeye, pink-and even the odd Atlantic salmon escaped from a nearby fish farm. Chinooks can get as big as 60 pounds, which up close can be kind of scary, says Temple, since many of her clients are seeing these fish in situ for the first time. A lot of people are surprised to find out there's more than one species, she says. Most of them have only ever seen a salmon on their plate.
July will be rush hour on the Campbell, as the river swells with some 165,000 pinks. But this kind of tourism is harmless to the fish, maintains Dave Ewart, a manager for Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans. As long as we don't have hundreds of people floating down the river every day, we'll be fine, He says. As for the clients, despite low water temperatures, brisk currents, and occasionally dangerous rapids, little has gone wrong - except for a 1999 mishap when a startled fish smacked a guide in the face. Yeah, says Temple, winding up for the inevitable fish joke. He got socked in the eye by a sockeye."
Outdoor Explorer
"A River Runs with Them"
by Catherine Buni
"It is both less dramatic and more stunning than I'd imagined, this swimming with salmon. For one thing, I don't know what the hell I m doing. I've never snorkeled whitewater before - who has? - and my guides have been leading this trip for only a few years. This river's been here forever, or something close to it. These fish, too, though some people say not for much longer.
Timeless, immutable, wrote biologist Edward O. Wilson in The Diversity of Life upon first seeing the Amazonian rainforest. And I feel much the same floating down the Campbell River, 100 miles north of Vancouver, on British Columbia's Vancouver Island. Faced with the very strength of the natural world around us, Wilson wrote, we wonder how much force does it take to break the crucible of evolution.
I am moving at the river's pace, flowing downstream with my face in the water, more like a fallen tree than a cloud, or, as my guide suggested, like a flying Superman. And yet I move not at all. The only time I am as weightless and motionless and held as this is in bed at night, a long day over.
But I am most definitely not in bed. I am soaring, my body absorbing the rapids in waves, finned feet flipping up while my shoulders lift over the next surge. Below me on the riverbed there are green rocks as small as Easter eggs, as big as breadboxes and, up ahead, I've been warned, as huge as Volkswagen Beetles. I could step out of the current, strip off the neoprene wet suit my guides have loaned me for the day and head into town for a latte. But I have a job to do, I remind myself. I ve traveled more than 3,000 miles from my New England home to snorkel down the Campbell as the Pacific salmon swim up it, to become one with this legendary fish and witness to the problems that plague it. And now, waiver forms signed and in the pocket of Catherine Temple, owner of the nascent Paradise Found Adventure Tours, I figure there's no turning back. So I tuck my fears back into the imaginary bed I've made for myself here on the Campbell and let the current carry me away. For about $45 US I'll get two one-hour sessions on the Campbell in which I'll float about 6 miles.
The water below me, first five feet of it, then 10 feet, suddenly an unsettling two feet or less and then deep again, is sea-foam green. If I turn my head to one side, water fills my ear, drowning out the roll of the rushing rapids. It is in this quiet that I let my swiftwater-rescue-certified guide Jamie Turko, slip out of sight. Finally, I'm alone with the fish.
They are darting and waving and fluttering, and I wonder how on earth I'll describe this unearthly experience to the uninitiated. Imagine being dropped into a fish tank. Only this is not a fish tank and these fish - mostly Chinook, also known as kings - weigh as much as 70 lbs and are half my size. In this watery context, they seem twice as wise. And why not. As a genus, Oncorhynchus has been around 45 million years longer than man. About five million years ago, while we were busy test-driving hairy hind legs, the salmon's ancestor wore fangs, weighed 500 pounds and grew to 10 feet. Today's version, in these cold waters a mere three million years, seems almost kittenish by comparison."
The National Post
"Running with the Lunkers"
by Cleo Paskal
"I am one with the salmon. "
"I have seen the bubbling thrash of white water from below. I have flowed silently over elegant mosaics of multi-coloured river stones. My shadow has darkened the laser beams of sunlight that pierce the surface of the water. I have been startled by the rumble of traffic on bridges. I have heard the rattle of fast water over small pebbles. I have rested in eddies and shunned fishermen. I am one with the salmon.
Granted I didn't swim upstream, fighting the current of a freshwater river, after two to seven years of roaming the open seas. And I wasn't crazed by reproductive desires, thinking only spawn, spawn, spawn. I mean, cultural appropriation can only go so far. No, I bonded with my favorite fish by putting on a wet suit and going down the Campbell River on northern Vancouver Island.
Yes I snorkeled with the salmon.
I didn't go on my own (how lame would that be.) I went with a small school of fry (first timers) and a guide trained in swift-water rescue. On the bank of the river, we wriggled into our full-body wet suits, fins, masks and snorkels. We were given an outline of how to use the current to our advantage and a brief intro to the wonderful world of salmonoids. Then we waded into an eddy, absorbed and quick shock of the cold water, and joined the current.
The thick wet suit not only kept me warm, but high in the water. As instructed, I assumed the flying Superman position and was amazed to find myself effortlessly cruising along at a very respectable clip.
The river bed itself, only a few feet below me, was a moving carpet of salmon and trout. Some scattered briefly as I flew by overhead, some didn't care. Underwater, the salmon looked radiant. They glinted silver, green, blue and red. The trout were even more spectacular: it seemed they were wearing more sequins than Streisand in the 70's.
When I got tired, I diverted into an eddy and hunted for crayfish as I caught my breath. Then I rejoined the surge of the river.
Two and a half kilometers later, where the fresh water of the Campbell meets the saltwater of the Pacific, we went ashore. But not before taking the time to watch the baby salmon acclimatizing themselves to saltwater by alternating between the lighter freshwater that flowed at the top of the river and the heavier sea water roiling near the bottom. It was exhilarating.
Our second run down the river was even better. This time we went four kilometers up and ran the rapids (again with a guide). To my amazement - and relief - I discovered that if I relaxed, the water would carry me between rocks and around obstacles. So, like a limp piece of seaweed, I coursed and bobbed through the white water. It was like being in a cross between a washing machine and a flotation tank.
After the rapids, we were back in the same stretch of water we had done before. Now an old hand, I completely relaxed my body and let the river carry me. Sometimes I watched the salmon, and in the calmer sections I closed my eyes. When we passed fishermen, I would pop my head out of the water and tell them where the fish were. Call it betrayal, but I've been at the other end of that rod, too.
The best time to snorkel the Campbell is from July to the end of October. Best to take off your jewellery unless you want to be considered one big fishing lure! Trout are cute from a few feet away, but attached to your ear they lose some of their charm.
The whole experience was superb. And the health of the river surprised me. It turns out, snorkeling with the salmon started as a purely practical endeavour, part of a range of activities to help keep the stocks in good health."
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