Alex Zimmerman is an adventurer, boatbuilder, and writer, occupations which paralleled his mainstream career as a technologist, executive, environmentalist, and consultant in the green buildings industry before his retirement, and which occupations he now can afford to indulge full-time.
Alex got a basic grounding in seamanship, navigation, and sailing as a junior engineer officer in the Canadian Navy and continued it by teaching in the Canadian Power Squadron after he left the Navy. He did a lot of big-boat sailing in other people’s boats before downsizing to kayaks and small open boats. He built all his own boats; his three kayaks and both of his sail and oar boats. He used his decades of experience to also design his latest sail and oar boat, the eighteen foot lug yawl that he named Fire-Drake.
Alex has long been fascinated by the marvelous coast of British Columbia, its natural wonders, its people, and its history. Alex has put several thousand self-propelled miles under the keels of his various boats over the past two and half decades exploring that coast. The culmination of that exploration was the successful and safe solo completion of British Columbia’s Inside Passage in 2017 in his boat, Fire-Drake.
Alex lives in Victoria, British Columbia with his wife, and between injuries, maintains the fiction that he is still a runner, and an athlete. He says he can stop boatbuilding any time he wants to.