After over twenty years of working in Toronto’s restaurant industry, Alex started his first season in the Antarctic aboard the Lyubov Orlovaas a barman and Zodiac driver in 2005. After this taste of adventure, he decided to commit himself to a full-time life at sea exploring the polar regions—and has not looked back.
Now, after fourteen seasons in the Antarctic—and eleven in the Arctic—Alex has sailed on fourteen different ships (including the icebreakers Kapitan Kalebnikovand Fifty Years of Victory, plus the expedition ships Lyubov Orlova, Ocean Nova, Akademik Vavilov, Ocean Adventurerand the M/V L’Austral, to name just a few). His travels have taken him to the Antarctic Peninsula more than one hundred and fifty times, including the Snow Hill emperor penguin colony, the Falklands and South Georgia Archipelagos, and south of the Antarctic Circle. He has also visited the other side of the Antarctic continent, visiting the huts of the Heroic Age—Shackleton, Scott, and Mawson.
Alex has travelled in the Arctic more than seventy times including the North Pole, Franz Josef Land, the Canadian High Arctic, the fabled Northwest Passage, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, and Svalbard. Two of his favourite summers were spent working as a Grizzly Guide in the Great Bear Rainforest at a lodge accessible only by boat or float plane. There, he developed an abiding interest in bears of all species—but grizzlies in particular.
With Adventure Canada, Alex has sailed the Arctic and beyond, including stops at Sable Island, through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Labrador coast, and three Circumnavigations of Newfoundland.
Alex hails from Toronto, about as far away from any of Canada’s oceans as is physically possible. He does, however, live near a very large lake.