photographer. “Honestly, it still brings me out in a cold sweat... I can remember it like it was yesterday. At the time, it set me back, for sure. Now I’m always very careful to look around for walruses and other dangerous mammals.”
From more recent stints around the Antarctic, to charting the tropical waters of Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, to chasing the next shot remains everything for Doug, and despite turning 70 this year, retirement is far from his mind, even though, by his own admission, time away from chilly temperatures can be therapy in itself. “It’s sometimes enough to come back and enjoy the simple things.” he says. “Being able to turn on a light switch without firing up a gas cylinder, – that, for me, is therapy; that’s what makes me relax.”
And yet his greater ambition remains to stumble across a narwhal, the three-metre tusked arctic whale. It is so shy of human contact that it’s never been photographed properly underwater before. “Somewhere there is an affable tusked narwhal — and I would give anything to spend 10 minutes in his company.”