Swim Guide is a website and smartphone app for iPhone® and Android. It helps you quickly find your closest beaches, know at a glance where to go swimming, and share your love of beaches with friends and family.

Swim Guide delivers free up-to-date water quality information for over 8,000 beaches, lakes, rivers, and swimming holes in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, the Bahamas, Costa Rica, Ireland, France, Denmark, New Zealand, Australia, and Kenya. Over 100 non-profit and public organizations from six countries have joined the Swim Guide Affiliates Program.

The iOS and Android apps are available in English, French, and Spanish.

A question of swimmability

Swim Drink Fish is pursuing a future where everyone can swim, drink and fish from their local waters. Swim Guide has a crucial role at every level of this journey, from bringing awareness to the contaminants threatening our waterways to helping people find, love, and protect their clean water.

Swim Guide began in Toronto when a team of Swim Drink Fish staff and volunteers set out to answer this simple question: Is it safe to swim in Lake Ontario?

It’s a crucial question. It’s an urgent question. It’s a starting point question. It’s also the most common question we receive from the people in our watershed. We thought it would be easy to find the answer. We were wrong.

As it turns out, reliable facts and figures about beach water quality are hard to find online, making it difficult for the average citizen to make informed decisions about where to swim. There is an estimated 3 to 8 percent risk of getting sick after swimming in a natural water source. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, three and a half million people per year get sick enough to throw up or get diarrhea after splashing in water containing harmful bacteria.

Without reliable and current data about water quality, people are vulnerable to illness and infection. When water isn’t safe to touch, people become alienated from it. When the connection between us and our water fades, so does our instinct to protect it.

In relentless pursuit of swimmable, drinkable, fishable water

We have been compiling water quality data and tracking beach water quality trends for more than a decade. In 2011, we decided we needed a tool that would tell you where the closest beaches are and provide you with up-to-date water quality information so that you can find your swimmable water right now.

Swim Guide app for iPhone®, Android, or web.

Swim Guide helps protect public health by showing people where the water is clean enough to swim and alerts them to contamination. It's come a long way since launching in 2011 when it had water quality information for only 800 beaches in the Great Lakes states, Ontario, and Vancouver-area.

• Swim Guide provides water quality information for over 8,000 beaches, rivers and lakes in six countries.

• Since launching, nearly five million individuals have used Swim Guide to find a clean place to swim.

• Over 100 non-profit and public organizations from six countries have joined the Swim Guide Affiliates Program.

Swim Guide’s momentum is the result of more and more people in more and more places asking, “Is the water swimmable?”

Swim Guide helps prevent thousands of waterborne illnesses by making it easy for people to know when their water is contaminated and when it is clean for swimming.

Swim Guide helps identify water pollution sources, so together, we can act to restore and maintain swimmable, drinkable, fishable waters.

Swim Guide works to strengthen the social, economic and cultural connections between communities and their beaches, ensuring long-term protection of clean waterfronts and building public support to restore polluted areas.

Donate to Swim Guide!

People love swimming in beautiful natural swimming spots. But most swimming and recreational water use sites that people visit are not monitored for water quality.

To ensure people have the up-to-date water quality information they need to prevent them from getting sick, we need to continue supporting and expanding beach water quality monitoring programs.

The more people choose clean water over polluted water, the more waterborne illnesses will be prevented.

Your contribution

Swim Drink Fish built Swim Guide for one reason: we want people to explore, enjoy, and fall in love with the beach so that our lake will be protected for generations to come.

Swim Drink Fish will honour you, your family, or your company on your favourite beach on Swim Guide.

Donate now on Swim Guide!

For every $300 we raise, we can monitor the health of one beach for one summer. For every $1,000 we raise, we can add a new beach to the Swim Guide program. For every $10,000 we raise, we can add a new region or launch a new feature in Swim Guide to better protect public health.