OUR PEOPLE
Hey, potential Sea Lion Adventure Tours guest. We’d love for you to meet us.
So often referred to as “staff,” we thought that sort of sounded impersonal; Sea Lion Adventure Tours has actual PEOPLE working hard and working together to make our tour company and our guests’ experience exceptional.
Stacy Smith is our President and Chief Strategy Officer. (Let’s be honest, Stacy is simultaneously our voice of reason and occasional “boat-rocker.”) She earned a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Arizona.After taking her LSATs, (and inexplicably to her parents), she decided not to go to law school, ran off to Hollywood, and spent the next decade working in the film and television industry. (And if you’re wondering what a Cultural Anthropology had to do with being a lawyer, her parents wondered the same thing. Stacy knew it didn’t really matter – the Ultimate Guide to Pre-Law admits as much – so she chose something she found interesting and would keep her going to class.)
After her stint in Hollywood, she eventually put her creative skills to work, creating a media company with her husband, Dale. Since moving to Alaska in 2012 (details in Dale’s bio below), Stacy first worked for a great boutique cruise line and spent many years working for an Alaska Native health consortium providing her writing and strategic skills in PR, communications, content, social media. When the “stars aligned” (as they say), making Sea Lion Tours & Adventures possible, she and her husband didn’t hesitate.
Dale was the superpower that made this happen. He spent the early part of his career as a business owner in the midwest and then found great success in sales and marketing.
Wait. There’s more to the story and how he and Stacy came to be in Alaska.
Cancer.
Seriously.
As you might imagine, a diagnosis of late-stage cancer (2007) can flip someone’s life and plans upside down, So, after Dale kicked the ass of stage IV b head and neck cancer, he had something adventurous in mind for whatever was to come afterward.
He decided the next adventure should be Alaska – with his wife’s enthusiastic permission, of course.
A job offer brought them both to Juneau in 2012, where he put his skills as a publisher to work, and later applied his expertise in sales and marketing for one of the largest tour operators in the area before he and Stacy started the Sea Lion brand.
As a founder and partner of a media company (along with his wife, Stacy), the experience he accumulated positioned him perfectly to handle our company’s unique operational responsibilities. He easily held our heads above water (pun intended) through two COVID summers and positioned us for the great recovery season of 2022.
Unfortunately, our Co-Founder/VP & Chief Operating Officer isn’t able to be with us in person, but definitely, in spirit. Dale was diagnosed with cancer (as you’ll see later it wasn’t the first time) and passed away in September 2021. We miss him a lot and will move mountains to turn this into his legacy and someday tell all sorts of tall tales about how it all happened.
