About Us

St Hilda Sea Adventures is a family-run, self-financed, proud Scottish business which started in 2006 with just one vessel St Hilda. Nowadays it has four vessels, four, full-time family members and over 25 seasonal staff. It employs many local businesses. The family members are:

Michael Marshall – Director / Founder

Michael William Marshall – Director / Founder Michael grew up by the sea and from the age of eleven owned, with his younger brother, a wooden, clinker-built boat. They kept it on a sand and shingle beach alongside the local fishermen’s larger inshore fishing boats. It was they who taught him how to pot and fish inshore, when it was safe to set out to sea and how to beach, tar, paint and varnish a wooden boat.

Michael left school at 16 and joined the merchant navy as a deck officer. He left the navy after eight years and became an academic teaching and researching at Yale, Cambridge and Newcastle universities and was always fortunate enough to own sail boats. Wooden at first progressing to a 36 foot aluminium yacht that he designed and fitted out, sailed to Portugal, lived aboard and then crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean. After many years there he sailed via the USA to Belize, took it overland the Guatemalan mountains on a truck to the Pacific Ocean and eventually sailed to southern Chile where the yacht now resides in Patagonia.

After leaving academia he set up a traditional and new media publishing company. During this period, he continued to sail and became involved with the USA based International Yachtmaster Training as an Instructor. Michael was invited by a local nautical college to become a sailing consultant for a 19th century three masted ship. The college also owned a sail training vessel, the wooden ketch St Hilda, which they sold to him. Over a two-year period, and working part-time with a shipwright, they finally converted St Hilda in 2006 from a 20 berthed sail training ship to one with eight berths and then put her up for charter.

Initially St Hilda was chartered by a Scottish University to search out fast tidal streams in the Hebrides for deploying experimental tidal turbines. After two years of tidal energy research Colette Dubois and Michael started the small ship cruising company St Hilda Sea Adventures.

Colette Dubois – Company Secretary / Sales

Colette was born in la Chaux-De-Fonds, in the Jura mountains in Switzerland at 1000m of altitude. She had initially trained as a primary school teacher and skiing was her forte. She grew up skiing and sledging every day during the winter months, as well as ice-skating on the frozen river and lakes near her home. Recently she has skied the notorious “Swiss Wall” which is rated as too difficult to fit into any standard ski slope classification!

She started sailing 40 years ago, when she met Michael, the founder of St Hilda Sea Adventures. After the tidal energy research in 2008 they started organising wildlife and sailing charter cruises, sailing out of the west coast Scottish marina in Dunoon. Colette became the chef and deckhand for these cruises. Today she is actively involved in Sales.

Julie Dubois Marshall – Director / Sales and Marketing

Julie grew up on the west coast of Scotland in Portpatrick, a small fishing village. She began sailing at the age of six with her father, an experienced sailor, on their family Wayfarer. Since then, her passion for sailing has grown.

She has sailed on tall ships, participated in dinghy racing, qualified as a dinghy instructor, completed her Yachtmaster theory exams and purchased her own 29ft classic yacht. She really enjoys the art and science of sailing.

After studying Offshore Engineering at Newcastle University, Julie worked in the Oil and Gas industry as an engineer and manager, traveling and working across various countries in Africa. In 2016 when her first boy was born, she decided it was time for a career change. She, along with her partner Christophe, took over the day to day running of the business from her parents and relocated to Oban, the gateway to the Hebridean Islands. Since then, the family have all been involved in expanding the business so that nowadays they have four, unique, small cruise ships exploring the beautiful Western Isles of Scotland.

Christophe Linsale – Director / Captain

Christophe is from France, he grew up in the Champagne region. When he was younger he enjoyed windsurfing on a lake in Champagne and, more recently, has taken up kitesurfing.

He studied engineering at Art et Métiers Grande Ecole and worked overseas mostly in West Africa as a field engineer and manager in the Oil and Gas industry. Here he met Julie and back in Scotland they had great fun sailing her 29ft yacht. One summer, after a few weeks on Julie’s yacht exploring the Inner Hebrides, he had to take the yacht single-handed back to her home port of Dunoon. Michael helped him reef the main sail before he set out south in a strong wind. It was during that exhilarating journey, through dangerous tidal waters with gusting winds, that he truly caught the sailing bug!

Inspired by the family’s passion for sailing, Christophe quickly obtained his commercial captain’s certificates as he and Julie took over the day to day running of the passenger charter business that was started with St Hilda. He also had the vision to expand the company and he, and the family, have been successful, going from one to four vessels.

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