Salmon and swimming pigs: The world"s weirder snorkeling spots

(CNN)With full-blown autumn just around the corner, you may be getting ready to hang up your mask and fins.

Not so fast.

Featuring a variety of strange features and creatures from the deep, these bizarre and beautiful snorkel spots will have you thinking about the water now -- and all winter long.

Snorkel with the salmon: Campbell River, British Columbia

It"s a surreal sight.

Every year in late summer and early autumn, a half million salmon make their way from the big waters of the Pacific to the cold flow of the Campbell River, on the northern end of Canada"s Vancouver Island.

These massive fish -- sockeye, Chinook, coho and pinks -- can grow to more than four feet in length and weigh upward of 100 pounds.

Here for their once-in-a-lifetime spawn, they"ve come to drop 300,000 eggs in these clear, clean, safe waters, and then die.

A local company called Destiny River outfits swimmers (for $125 CAD, less than $100 USD) with a wetsuit and a mask and drops them in the heart of the action, where they then float, face-down, a few miles, all the way to the sea, through a strange, subaquatic world, one swirling with thousands and thousands of prehistoric-looking monsters.

Swim with the pigs: Bahamas

It"s no secret that Ecuador"s Galapagos Islands are one of the world"s great wildlife destinations.

Home to dozens of endemic species and famous for the fact that they have few natural predators, visitors often interact with the islands" famous blue-footed boobies and giant tortoises and other fascinating animals on a level unknown pretty much anywhere else.

And that"s as true on land as it is in the water.

Environmentally friendly cruise companies like Ecoventura include snorkel and dive excursions with penguins, sharks, sea turtles and sea lions.

The latter, Galapagos sea lions, breed almost exclusively on the archipelago and often approach to within a couple of inches to inspect you, their whiskers almost brushing your face.

Big -- sometimes more than 500 pounds -- they torpedo through the dark waters below. After that adrenaline rush, you"ll be happy to chill out by swimming with some of the Galapagos green sea turtles that slowly paddle past on a regular basis.

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