Month: February 2021
We end up abandoning plans to practice tacking and gybing, and have to motor for the full crossing. There isn’t even enough wind to motor-sail. We are practically becalmed, the sea inky and still. In October 2015, immediately after doing our RYA Competent Crew practical in the BVIs, we took our Day Skipper practical. We’d […]
“Cow!” Skipper Mick shouts from the helm. We confusedly jump across to the starboard side and follow his outstretched finger, catching a glimpse of a green scaly head before it disappears below the waves. We look back at Mick. “Well, you can’t shout turtle. They’ll know you’re on to them”. This is the story of […]
2020 was going to be our year. True, we’d thought that about 2016. And 2017. And 2018. 2019 gets a pass because of life in general, but 2020 we were finally going to do it. The big decision We started 2020 in Jacksonville, staying with our “Christmas family”, who had temporarily moved from Colorado. We […]
It was February 1999, in a small Scottish town called Jedburgh (Jed, or Jeddart to locals). A chance meeting I was a 16 year old goth, taking media studies at the local college in Hawick, and spending my weekends sneaking into pubs with college friends. Colin, barely aged 19, had recently moved from Glasgow to […]
Hi, we’re Colin and Ailsa Burn-Murdoch, AKA SV Mirounga Leonina, or Mirounga for short. Is this the beginning? Is it just before? Or are we well in to our journey? Only time will tell. Where are we now? At the moment, we are exactly 6 weeks from leaving the UK to meet Mirounga, our 1997 […]
In 22 years, we’ve gone through a lot together. Too much to say it all here, but if we want to look at how we found ourselves 6 weeks from leaving the UK to go and live on a boat we’ve never seen, we need to start somewhere around the early 2000s. This about a […]
I spent my small years in Gower in South Wales, and spent a lot of time right next to the beach. I don’t think I realised what a privilege that was when I was there, but to be fair, we left when I was 11. My teenage years were spent in Glasgow, where I mostly […]
I always say that the easiest way to say it is “Ale-sa”.
Well, it’s not if you have a Scottish accent, it’s not that simple, which has always been a conundrum for me.