AQUATIC RECREATION
Aquatic recreation has a particular appeal to human nature. The majority of resorts, holiday hotels, tourist lounges and sports camps, the bulk of short-term camping grounds and suburban recreation zones are located either directly on the banks of rivers and/or other water bodies or in their immediate vicinity in The Riverside. Aquatic resources of River Angara basin are widely employed for recreational purposes, i.e. rest, sports, health improvement, tourism, sports fishing and hunting and other activities of people on holiday.
Currently, there are about ten resorts, sanato-riums and balneological clinics that make use of the sub-surface hydromineral resources: the resorts «Angara», «Arshan», «Usol’ye»; sanatoriums and balneological clinics «Baikal», «Bratsk Offing», «Zhemtchug», «Nilova Pustyn’», «Novoye Usol’ye», «Shumak Springs», etc., in The Riverside. Planned aquatic tourism is organized only in Irkutsk Reservoir through to Lake Baikal. Independent aquatic tourism is better developed, especially the floating on mountain and taiga1 rivers of III-V categories of difficulty on canoes, rafts, catamarans, inflatable, row, and motor boats. Sailing sport and yachting become increasingly popular on Bratsk and Irkutsk reservoirs. The use of water-bodies for sports fishing and hunting of water-and moorland fowl is a tradition of long standing in The Riverside.
The reservoirs of River Angara Chain have particular recreational value due to the fact that half of the urban population of The Riverside resides on their immediate shores, while 70% of city dwellers are concentrated within two hour drive of a water-body. The creation of the reservoirs provided, on the one hand, wide opportunities for the development of certain sport and tourist activities within their reaches (sailing sport, yachting, etc.), while on the other hand the decrease of water-temperature in the after-bays of the dams eliminated the use of River Angara for bathing in the cities Angarsk, Usol’ye-Sibirskoye, Bratsk, Ust’-Ilimsk. Making high demands of the quality of water, recreation is itself a substantial source of pollution of aquatic environment: the ships, cutters, and motor boats employed for sports and tourism pollute water-bodies with petroleum products, aquatic recreational establishments discharge municipal sewage, independent beach-and-bathe recreation and tourism leaves hard waste in water-flows and water-bodies.