I drove down to Port Lincoln in South Australia the 'Tuna Capital of the World" after watching a BBC documentary on Australia and seeing what happens with Bluefin tuna here ( That sounds ominous but isn't). The tuna are caught in nets out at sea in their schools and are then put into nets closer in the sea where they are fattened up over months and then sold on. The tuna are in these massive enclosures:
They can grow to be 2 meters (6.6 feet) long and can weigh 200 kilo (450 pounds) and can swim at 45 mph, so I decided that I had to come down here to swim with them. The boat took us out to this platform in the ocean where there were 30 tuna swimming around that weighed roughly 70 kilo (150 pounds). For people that didn't want to swim with them they could feed the tuna, but I climbed in with them and was actually pretty scared, the water was VERY cold and dark and the tuna moved so fast they would appear out of nowhere zoom by me and then be gone. We had to wear gloves and boots so the tuna wouldn't bite our feet.
This looks weird, but the Tuna was grabbing a small fish to eat from a stick
Once I got back to land I jumped off the tuna boat and quickly boarded the sea lion boat. This boat had only 4 passangers and three crew members. We took the boat out an hour and a half to an Australian sea lion colony where we got in the water and the sea lions quickly came around to check us out and swim with us. They were as interested in us as we were in them. I was doing this underwater tag thing with one of the sea lions, where I would go left and it would go right, jumping back and forth swimming net to eachother. Then the sea lion changed the pattern and wanted me to chase it, but it forgot that I can't swim nearly as fast as it can and so it lost interest in me.
Fist-bumping a sea lion
Selfie with a sea lion
Hello.....
See the rest of the tuna pictures HERE
See the rest of the sea lion pictures HERE
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