Blog

We almost can’t believe it but it’s a year today since we posted our first blogs! We started to post six weeks before moving to Bequia, and started by introducing ourselves and sharing our sailing history. Then the blog has become about moving to the Caribbean, adjusting to life onboard, and our adventures sailing the […]

Hurricane Elsa wasn’t the first tropical storm we’ve experienced. The first was actually on our wedding day, 8 years ago today. We had booked a holiday to Barbados and Montserrat in the January of that year. At the end of May, on my birthday, Colin suggested we get married while we were there. I had […]

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.