Newsletter
OYT South bulletin 29th July 2021
In this Bulletin
Sections which have changed since last time marked *
- * Sea staff vacancies - new dates - can anyone help?
- * Voyage feedback
- * Voyage news
- Vessel tracking
- Chris Ellis Award– win £££s off the price of your next voyage!
- Core refit team needed
- Financial appeal
- Painting of Prolific - prints available to buy!
- Raise funds for OYT South if you're shopping online!
- OYT South social media - please get involved
- Branded clothing
- Raise And Sail - website for anyone looking to raise money to come sailing
- New readers’ welcome and introduction
- Receiving this newsletter by email
* Sea staff vacancies - new dates – can anyone help?
Many thanks to all the people who have responded to last week’s list of vacancies – most of them are filled now but we do have a couple of new gaps:
Can anyone do either of the following voyages:
Sat 21 Aug – Thurs 26 Aug, Dartmouth to Poole – one volunteer needed
Sat 18 Sept, Southampton – one volunteer needed for day sail
All dates are when crew are on board – volunteers will generally be expected to join the afternoon before.
Email webmaster1@oytsouth.org if you can help.
We are looking for people whose DBS, references and other qualifications are up to date in our records or can be brought up to date in time.
* Voyage feedback
We have had some lovely feedback from recent voyages. One mum wrote: “I just wanted to write to say a massive a heartfelt thank you to the skipper and crew for making my son’s voyage a week he will never forget. He said it was beyond words: ‘We sailed with dolphins. We sailed through the night. We cooked. We played cards. We learned so much about sailing. The crew were all so friendly and helpful.’ So thank you all so much for a truly unforgettable week.”
Another mum wrote: “[My daughter] had a great time on her recent voyage and I think this was a great way for her to end a stressful school year … I wanted to thank you, and OYT South for the opportunities you have given her. She has faced many challenges in the last few years and your work has helped towards giving her the tools and confidence to realise she is as able and deserving as others to achieve.” This family is now hoping that several younger siblings might be able to sail with us in due course!
* Voyage news
This week’s voyage has seen the very welcome return of MACS, the charity for young people born without eyes or with underdeveloped eyes. The crew includes some young people with MACS conditions as well as siblings and a carer.
We are delighted that this voyage was part-sponsored by Sail Training International’s Youth Development Fund - vital support this year for two reasons. First, MACS normally does a lot of their fundraising through events such as the London Marathon, which were cancelled during the pandemic. This made it so important to find other sources of support to ensure that the voyage could go ahead. And second, while young people have been affected by the pandemic and lockdowns in such a wide variety of ways, it is not hard to imagine the particular pressures on MACS families. People with visual impairments rely on touch to engage with the world – which creates huge issues with social distancing. Meanwhile, the need for home-schooling, parental concerns about employment, delayed medical appointments and a lack of respite care mean that MACS families have needed support more than ever this year. Lockdown has had a significant impact on confidence, independence, and mental health, especially stress and anxiety, for MACS families. So to be able to get a MACS group out on the water is a huge achievement for all concerned.
This is a great example of partnership between charities: MACS with their regular contact with families during the pandemic, knowing how much young people needed a chance for activities to develop their confidence and rebuild their social connections, but having lost key fundraising opportunities due to Covid; Ocean Youth Trust South, unable to operate or earn voyage income for 603 days, but with an amazing boat, staff and volunteers all ready to help young people the moment we could do so safely; a great co-operative effort to develop a fundraising application submitted jointly by the two charities; and Sail Training International with a generous funding programme to support the initiative, as well as other kind donors who made up the rest of the voyage costs.
The group joined us on Saturday and sailed from Brixham to Dartmouth on the first evening. By Sunday morning everyone was ready to set off for a good sail:
The plan was for Plymouth but the weather was so good and everyone was having such a great time that they kept going, and sailed all the way to Fowey. They did winch drills on the way and everyone got involved with sail hoists.
In Fowey there was time for shore leave, paddling on the beach and ice-creams.
As they left Fowey, they pretended they had an engine failure and needed super-quick and efficient staysail and mizzen hoists – everyone did a brilliant job! They then did a man overboard recovery drill and started motoring towards Mevagissey as the wind was against them, aiming to use the time to give people a chance to get out on the bowsprit. No sooner had they started this than they heard over the VHF that a vessel ahead of them was in trouble – with a genuine engine failure! - so they speeded up and headed towards them, keeping in touch on the radio and with some of our crew keeping a great lookout for them with binoculars. Luckily they were able to get their engine started again and we continued to Portmellon.
Next day we sailed off the anchor with crew member Angel on the helm. You can see her video here. They had a good downwind sail to Cawsand, with people getting the hang of gybing and some of them getting out on the bowsprit. Others waited for their bowsprit trips until we were anchored in Cawsand, and there was a huge achievement for crew member Pearl who is blind: she had sailed with us several times before but this was the first time she was actually able to get out on the bowsprit. The skipper commented on the huge progress made by Pearl and other returning crew members whose confidence and skills have improved beyond all recognition since they first sailed with us.
After dinner in Cawsand they headed further into Plymouth Harbour – a nice evening/night sail where some of the crew found that they could see the navigation screens more clearly without the glare of daylight. They spent Wednesday tucked safely in shelter while some bad weather came through and enjoyed showers, shore leave and training towards their RYA certificates.
They left Plymouth this morning and are keeping an eye on the forecast as they decide whether to go back to Brixham tonight or not.
Big thanks to sea staff Holly, Rooby, Becky, Matt, Josh and Andy Brown.
In what is surely an OYC/OYT first (unless anyone knows any different?), two of our volunteers, Rooby and Becky, are using this voyage as their honeymoon! Huge congratulations to them – we hope that honeymooning at sea with the lovely MACS crew has lived up to your expectations, and we wish you every happiness for the future:
Vessel tracking
Don’t forget you can always have a look and see where Prolific is sailing.
Just for the moment we can’t welcome visitors on board due to Covid protocols but if you discover that Prolific is in a harbour somewhere near you, please go and say hello from a safe distance. And sometimes you may be just what we need if you have local information or a bit of time to spare to help with something, or a car for running a quick errand!
Big thanks to the Graham High Charity who sponsor our vessel tracking.
Chris Ellis Award – win £££s off the price of your next voyage!
Now open for 2021 entries.
If you enjoy a voyage with OYT South and want to come again (and are aged 11-25), please think about entering for this award. You can win up to £500 off the price of another voyage, by sending in an account of a voyage you have already done with us. It can be a logbook, diary, story, pictures, video - anything which gives the judges an idea of why you had a good time and would like to come again. The prize is judged at the end of each season and the award can be spent on a voyage the following year. Entries should be emailed to webmaster1@oytsouth.org or posted to the office. See here for more details of this award, which was set up in memory of the charity's founder. You can also see some previous winning entries.
There were no 2020 winners because we were unable to sail, so it would be great to see an excellent crop of entries for 2021!
Core refit team needed
Obviously our winter plans are all dependent on what we can do in a Covid-safe manner, but all being well, we will be looking for a core team of volunteers to come and help us this winter from November to March. This is something we've been doing since at least 2002: a small full-time team offers continuity alongside all the other volunteers who come for odd days or weekends. We provide free food and accommodation for the core team as well as great experience in boat maintenance and a chance to make a real difference to a good cause while enjoying a sociable winter in the team. Many previous core team members are still great friends of the charity - some still sailing with us, others using the experience to help develop their careers. If you want to follow in the footsteps of Jake, Oran and Ian from the last full-time core team, and all the others who have gone before them, please see here for details and how to apply.
Financial appeal
We need a regular flow of funds to cover at least three major areas: bursaries for young people who could not otherwise afford to sail; vessel maintenance and equipment; and staff salaries - please help, or pass on our details to anyone you come across who might make a grant, large or small.
See here for how to make a donation - you can contribute by cheque, phone or PayPal, but please do something if you possibly can. Don't forget that if you complete and return a Gift Aid form (pdf) we can claim back tax on your donation.
Painting of Prolific – prints available to buy!
Our friend, Gosport-based marine artist Colin Baxter, has prints taken from an original painting of Prolific available for you to buy.
The unframed prints will measure 370mm x 230mm plus border. They will be numbered and signed, and will cost £45 if you can pick yours up in Gosport, and £50 if you need it posted (they will probably come rolled in a cardboard tube). Order here:
Anyone outside the UK wanting to order a copy, please email us.
Raise funds for OYT South if you're shopping online!
"What a fool I was!" says Mark Todd.
"For ages I've seen in the bulletin that Easyfundraising is a good way to raise money for charity, but I never got round to doing anything about it, and when Caz told me how easy it was, I didn't listen.
I thought it might be a hassle, or that I'd have to remember to do something when I bought stuff online, or that it probably wasn't really worthwhile.
This week I finally got round to it and it turns out it's a REALLY EASY way to raise money for the charity I care about ... and I definitely should have done it sooner.
It takes a minute or two to sign up; you can do it on a desktop, tablet and/or phone, and you can install a widget that flags up when a donation is available. Once that's done, imagine you're looking to buy - say - a rainbow unicorn: just put "rainbow unicorn" in your usual search box, and the list of results shows you which sites come with donations, and how much. It's up to you what to pick and whether to accept the donation from the site, but a huge choice of sites will offer a donation - and it doesn't cost you a penny.
I don't know why I didn't do it sooner ... but if there's anyone else who has been like me and just not got round to it, PLEASE click the link now and sign up!"
OYT South is also registered with Amazon Smile which makes donations to us when people shop - Amazon will donate 0.5% of the net purchase price on eligible purchases. If you ever shop with Amazon, do have a look - once you pick Ocean Youth Trust South as your chosen charity and start using https://smile.amazon.co.uk, you don't need to do anything further, and all your other Amazon account settings remain unchanged.
OYT South social media – please get involved
One of the simplest ways you can help us while we can’t sail is to keep looking at our social media pages and share, retweet or like as many posts as possible. This all helps to make sure other people hear about us too – and the more we can keep alive the interest in our charitable work, the more people might help us now or start to think about sailing with us in future. Maybe you’ve got a community group, a local page, even a street WhatsApp where members might like to know that you are involved with a charity that could be of interest to them?
We are on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/oytsouth - please do give us a Like! If you were friends with John Laing on our old page (https://www.facebook.com/johnlaingsailing please do move to the new page now.
We are also on Twitter @oytsouth so please follow us!
And Instagram @oyt_south
And LinkedIn Ocean Youth Trust South
Please note that OYT South has a policy that our adult staff and volunteers should not make or accept individual online friend requests with crew members aged under 18, or vulnerable adults. Crew members can use the sites to stay in touch with the boat and with each other, but not with individual staff and volunteers.
Branded clothing
OYT South branded clothing available - please see here. You can buy hoodies (in a wide range of colours), fleeces, short- and long-sleeved t-shirts, baseball caps, beanie hats, polo shirts and more, all with OYT South's logo!
Raise And Sail - website for anyone looking to raise money to come sailing
Raise And Sail is a section of this website full of ideas, information and support for young people who would like to raise money in order to come sailing with us. Huge thanks to Fiona Keen and Emma Burrows for putting Raise And Sail together. We hope you will find it useful - let us know how you get on as we can add success stories and new ideas to the site in due course.
New readers' welcome and introduction
If you have recently registered your interest in OYT South, welcome to our newsletter, which is sent out almost every week, normally on a Friday, and is also copied onto the website.
If you have just started receiving this newsletter by email, it is because we believe you have signed up and consented to receive it - perhaps by emailing us to ask for it, completing a form on our website, or adding your email address to the book on board where people can sign up to receive news, as well as leaving comments. If this was a mistake or you simply decide you want to stop receiving the newsletter, just press “reply” to the email and write UNSUBSCRIBE at the top, or email webmaster1@oytsouth.org asking to unsubscribe.
Each week the newsletter includes a wide range of news from the boat and from the charity, including details of voyages available for young people; adult voyages; opportunities for adult volunteers both ashore and afloat, and much more. We find that while some people read the bulletin almost every week, many others dip in and out, and read it when it's convenient - which is why some items are repeated. New items are marked with an asterisk * so that if you did read it last week, you can see which sections you can safely skip.
Please feel free to join in any OYT South activities - nothing here is restricted to long-standing members or people who already know one another. New people are always very welcome!
If you need an introduction to the work of OYT South, you should find a lot of useful information on our website. But essentially, we are a registered charity (no. 1079959) which exists to offer adventure under sail as a personal development opportunity for young people aged 12-25, from the widest possible range of backgrounds. A high proportion of our young crew members are disadvantaged or deserving in some way: many of these sail in groups organised by other charities, youth clubs, special schools and so on, and will fill the bulk of our term-time voyages. But those from more fortunate backgrounds are also welcome to sail, either in groups or by coming as individuals on a mixed voyage. Every year we run a variety of shorter local voyages plus longer adventure trips - sometimes including Tall Ships races during the summer holidays. If you are aged 12-25 and hoping to sail as a crew member, take a look here - and this section is also useful for adults who are thinking of organising a voyage for a young person. Adults planning to organise a full group voyage should also see here. Adults who want to sail themselves should see here.
We have a professional staff skipper and engineer, but our watch leaders are normally all volunteers, who combine sailing skills with an interest in working with young people. You can find more information here - how the system works, how to join, and profiles of existing staff and volunteers.
To volunteer for OYT South ashore, please see here. To help with the vessel's annual refit, see here.
It is a very expensive business maintaining a boat, running an office and employing staff. If you want to help us, please become a member of OYT South. Or see here for information on making a donation.
If you have any questions, please do email - or contact the office.
Receiving this newsletter by email
Many thanks to all those who have given consent to receiving this newsletter by email. If you are not currently getting it by email and would like to, please just click here Newsletter Subscribe and press "send", or email webmaster1@oytsouth.org.
