A few weeks ago Lingamish posted on Swimming with sharks, complete with a scary-looking picture of a shark jumping out of the water, supposedly near where he had been swimming in South Africa. But it turns out he never even saw a shark himself, he just got scared of them because of some pictures he saw in a British newspaper. In fact from this photo it looks as if he put on his swimming trunks but didn’t go within a mile of the sea.

This kind of wimpishness wouldn’t have gone down well in Australia where I spent six months in 2002-3. The sea all around the island continent was infested by sharks, but that didn’t stop everyone, including me, from spending as much as they could of the summer in it. The only sharks I actually saw were in an aquarium. But a friend of mine deliberately went diving with sharks, and showed me a video he had taken of his encounters. Apparently they are quite harmless if you know how to react to them: you should swim towards them and hit them on the nose!

Anyway, sharks are nothing to Australian crocodiles. And I went swimming with them as well – once in a place where there was a warning sign but we were assured it was in fact safe, and another time by mistake in a place which was not safe. I didn’t have any close encounters while swimming with them. But I did from a boat. These two pictures – full length photos with a normal lens – are not from a newspaper, I took them myself. Click to see them full size.

These photos are taken on the Adelaide river in the Northern Territory. These saltwater crocs are living in the wild but are fed from tourist boats like the one I was on, in effect trained to jump out of the water to take lumps of meat off a kind of fishing rod. They were so close that I could almost have touched them – but we were warned to keep our hands inside the boat, in case the crocs thought they were lumps of meat being offered to them.