In this Bulletin
Sections which have changed since last time marked *
- * Voyage news
- * Volunteer sea staff – spaces that MUST be filled – can you help? Including NEW vacancies due to a cancellation ☹
- * Planning a gap year, or not working over the winter? Join our refit core team!
- Do you need a Powerboat Level 2 qualification (required for driving Prolific’s dinghy)
- * AGM 2025 – a date for your diary
- Shorebased training weekend February 2026
- * 2025 individual voyages available – individual bookings for young people
- * 2025 group voyages – and plans for 2026
- 2025 adult voyage available
- Prolific maintenance days – help needed
- Chris Ellis Award – win £££s of the price of your next voyage
- Keeping our website up to date – can you help?
- Advice on careers in the marine sector for young people
- * Financial appeal
- Raise funds for OYT South if you’re shopping online – we’ve made over £2,700 through Easyfundraising! Are you aware of the size of donations available?
- Vessel tracking – see where Prolific is sailing
- OYT South social media – please share as well as liking! NB we are now on Bluesky instead of Twitter/X
- New readers’ welcome and introduction
- Receiving this newsletter by email
* Voyage news
The last newsletter ended as our crew from Harris Merton School were leaving the boat. Their feedback included:
“I loved the fact that we got so many opportunities to learn new skills and I’m just really appreciative of that. Thanks! The best part of the trip was probably when I was steering.”
“I loved how all the crew is welcoming and I like how I can tie different types of knots. I really enjoyed this experience and keep on going with OYT is really helpful. My favourite part of the trip was when I was able to drive the boat, I really liked it and I learnt how to, like, keep it at the right degree.”
“It was quite challenging at the start of the voyage but I enjoyed the experience in the end. The best part of the trip was navigating and steering the boat.”
“I loved this trip it was amazing. I learned new skills I would never forget. Thank you! The best part for me on this trip was probably navigating and speaking on the radio. The most memorable part was working together as a team and having a laugh.”
“I enjoyed the trip as we were able to learn new experiences and we was able to use our skills to navigate us back to Ocean Village.”
“I really enjoyed the trip as I did new experiences and learnt new skills and the staff were very friendly. My favourite part was on Thursday when I got to steer the boat and we were navigating it.”
And from the school staff who sailed with them:
“I was one of the teachers on this trip and it’s my second time on Prolific. Similar to last time, had a fantastic time and got to hone in on sailing skills. The staff were fantastic and accommodated us through difficult weather situations. The Thursday navigating, so when the Reds and the Greens had planned and prepped their navigating and then actually sailing back to Southampton was really really good.”
“As a teacher on this trip it was a great experience, seeing the kids gain confidence and learn new skills was really special.”
Last Saturday was a maintenance day – big thanks to Constantinos, Glyn Collins, Iori Kent, Matt Roe, Si Brammer and Val Hague. They got through a huge amount of work, including a mizzen rig check, replacing the day fridge seal, sorting all the lifejackets, a temporary repair on one of the deck boxes, some work on the steps by the capping rail on both sides, bulding a batten for the battle banner (try saying that in a hurry!) and working on the seat bases so they don’t scratch the saloon floor.
Sunday brought the very welcome return of Alfreton Park, a special school working with young people with physical and learning difficulties plus several of their staff. They had dinner on the way to Cowes on the first night and were in bed not long after getting alongside.
On Monday they went out into the Solent under staysail:
They anchored to watch the sunset before a birthday party and cake for one of their teachers.
On Tuesday they motored up the Solent in breezy conditions and had a training session on the safe use of winches. Then they hoisted the ORC and the mizzen with two reefs and sailed on down to Lymington.
One of the crew turned 16 that day so there was another birthday celebration! There was also a spectacular simultaneous sunset and moonrise to be seen.
Wednesday was a beautiful sunny day and they headed out under one reef and had an epic tacking session!
Once everyone was thoroughly worn out they went in to Cowes and played games and worked on their personal logbooks before getting fish and chips and bringing them back to eat on board – followed by a walk ashore to see the sunset.
After a trip to the shops they left Cowes yesterday morning and endured heavy rain on the passage up Southampton Water, followed by a good clean-up, dinner and the end-of-voyage debrief as they had to head back to Derbyshire very early this morning.
They completed 125 miles and you can see the voyage track here. Three of the students earned RYA Start Yachting certificates. Big thanks to sea staff Constantinos, Glyn Collins, Annant Shah, Iori Kent, Keri Hammond and Val Hague who is making good progress with her second mate assessment! Thanks also to the Alfreton Park staff who were great as ever.
* Volunteer sea staff – spaces that MUST be filled – can you help? Including NEW vacancies due to a cancellation ☹
Whether or not you already have voyages booked as a volunteer this season, these are the spaces still available – please let us know if you can help with anything. Berths listed for “trainee mates” or “trainee bosuns” MAY be suitable for people who earned new recommendations last year or this year to join our volunteer team, even if you have never sailed in a staff berth before – please ask whether any particular vacancy might be appropriate for you. Dates on this list are when young people are on board – please note that we normally need volunteers the afternoon before, to help get everything ready.
30 July – 4 Aug, Brixham – qualified watchleader
5-10 Aug, Brixham – second mate, or an additional first mate (with the option of sailing either as 1M or engineer)
27-30 Sept, Southampton – qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun
1-5 Oct, Southampton – two watchleaders or one watchleader and a bosun – one must be qualified, the other could be a trainee
6-10 Oct, Southampton – qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun
14-19 Oct, Southampton – qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun
If you are a NEW volunteer who has earned your recommendation on the recent training weekend or on another voyage this year, there may be other options in addition to the list above – please send in details of your availability and we’ll see when we might be able to get you booked to sail.
Contact caroline.white@oytsouth.org if you would be interested in sailing on any of these voyages.
For those who are new to the process, do please remember that if you commit to a voyage booking then we do really need you! Sometimes people assume that with several staff and volunteers on each voyage, it won’t be a problem to drop out; or you may think that if you’re not a qualified volunteer, you are not essential to the voyage. But in practice, we need a certain number of adults on every voyage in order to be able to sail – and you may, for example, be the only female member of sea staff on a voyage which has girls in the crew. It’s quite possible that a voyage can’t go ahead without you, which is why we need to avoid people dropping out and if it is absolutely unavoidable, we need as much notice as possible. It is also why we appreciate you all and the time you give to the charity very much indeed!
Young people aged 16-25 who have sailed with us and earned a recommendation to train as volunteers but who need more experience before taking on the full responsibilities of watchleader or bosun can also apply for funding to join an individual voyage as a crew member, to gain extra time on board and develop their skills.
* Planning a gap year, or not working over the winter? Join our refit core team!
If you are planning a gap year, or you are between jobs or for any other reason potentially available for several weeks or months this winter, might you be interested in joining our full-time refit team? We will need a couple of full-time volunteers between November and March. More details here. Plenty of our previous refit volunteers have gone on to great jobs in the marine industry – it really helps to have maintenance experience as well as good sailing skills when applying for sailing jobs! And any refit volunteers who want to sail in Prolific can be offered berths as watchleaders, bosuns, or relief engineers. So it’s a great way of developing useful experience, contributing to a good cause, securing free food and accommodation for a few months, and having a positive experience with a fun group of people! If you’re interested, please read the web page and email us with the details requested at the bottom of the page.
Do you need a Powerboat level 2 qualification (required for driving Prolific’s dinghy)
A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned that one of our volunteers, Patrick Kelly, was looking to do a Powerboat Level 2 course, and Dom Coleman (ace instructor and OYT South volunteer) from Dorset Marine Training had offered discounted rates if we could help fill the course with other OYT South people. We had such a great response that we have filled one course and now we need two more people to fill a second one on 5th/6th July! Email webmaster1@oytsouth.org if you are interested, and we’ll put you in touch with Patrick.
* AGM 2025 – a date for your diary
Our AGM and social evening will be 8th November – save the date!
Shorebased training weekend February 2026
Regular readers will know that we run a training weekend for staff and volunteers with a variety of sailing and youthwork courses in February each year. For 2026, we have reserved the weekend of 7-8 February – please put the date in your diary! We will be offering the RYA First Aid course (which needs renewing every three years – check when yours goes out of date) but for the rest of the weekend we are interested in your suggestions. Is there something you would really like to cover? It might be something new, or something we have done before where you would like a refresher. Or are you an instructor, or someone with expertise in a subject that might interest our staff and volunteers – could you offer to run a session? Please let us know your suggestions!
* 2025 individual voyages available – individual bookings for young people
Our 2025 programme has plenty of exciting opportunities to join us this year!
Please spread the word!
These are voyages for young people who want to join a voyage as individuals or smaller groups, and mix with others:
30 June – 6 July, Southampton to Le Havre, £735 per person, 6 nights, age 15-25,. Ends with time at a Tall Ships festival – an amazing experience with the fleet! Only 2 places left
6-12 July, Le Havre to Dunkirk, 6 nights, age 15-25, £735 per person plus travel. Tall Ships Race with a festival at either end – the experience of a lifetime. 1 last place possibly left
18-23 July, Poole to Brixham, 5 nights, age 11-25, £630 per person
24-29 July, Brixham to Brixham, 5 nights, age 11-25, £630 per person
11-15 August, Brixham to Brixham, 4 nights, age 11-16, £525 per person. Aimed at younger crew members and anyone without a passport. A lot of our individual voyages attract keen young sailors, over-18s, people doing the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, and people wanting to test themselves with a challenging adventure; and, weather permitting, longer passages such as Channel crossings. But this doesn’t suit everyone! So this voyage has been designated as a shorter coastal voyage and a gentler opportunity, ideal for the younger end of our age range (11-16-year-olds) and passports not required. Ideal for anyone who is unsure about coping with a more ambitious voyage and wants an easier introduction. Only 3 places left
30 Aug – 3 Sept, Poole to Southampton, 4 nights, age 11-25, £525 per person
4-9 Sept, Southampton to Southampton, 5 nights, age 15-25, £630 per person. Only 4 places left
29 Oct – 2 Nov, Southampton, 4 nights, age 11-25, £545 per person – half term
Email voyageadmin@oytsouth.org to ask about individual bookings.
2025 group voyages – and plans for 2026
Do you know a school or youth club or another organisation which might like an exclusive booking for 12-15 people?
All group voyages for 2025 are currently reserved; but please email caroline.white@oytsouth.org if you would like to be informed if we happen to have a cancellation which might leave space for your group.
We have sent a draft 2026 programme to regular clients for comments – please ask if you are a new potential group client and would like to be added to the mailing list for group bookings next year.
2025 adult voyage available
We have one remaining voyage for adult individual bookings:
10-12 Oct, Southampton, 2 nights, age range 18+, £265 per person, weekend voyage (Friday evening to Sunday evening)
All welcome – but the weekend is particularly useful for anyone who is thinking of joining our sailing volunteers for 2026, and wants to find out more! Email for details or to make a booking.
Prolific maintenance days – help needed!
We have planned maintenance days this season on the following dates – please put them in your diary and email us if you can help. Skilled and unskilled tasks available – or maybe a chance to learn a new skill. Over-18s only, please, except for 16- and 17-year-olds who have sailed with us already and been recommended to return as volunteers – you MAY be able to attend maintenance days with the skipper’s permission depending on what jobs we are doing.
Sunday 29th June – Southampton
Friday 22nd August – Brixham
Monday 13th October– Southampton
Chris Ellis Award – win £££s of the price of your next voyage
Open for 2025 entries.
If you have enjoyed 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 one of the charity’s founders. You can also see some previous winning entries.
Keeping our website up to date – can you help?
OYT South’s website is quite big and has a lot of pages – it’s possible that someone may be looking at a page which none of our staff has re-read for quite a while, or clicking a link we haven’t tried recently. So if you spot any broken links, errors or anything out of date, PLEASE tell us. We can only put things right if we know about them. This is a great way for someone to help us, especially if you can’t easily volunteer on voyages or help with events or maintenance. The odd hour or so in the comfort of your own home, looking through the website (and trying to imagine how it would work for someone new to us) is always very much appreciated! This is an ongoing task, not something that needs to be done on or by a specific date.
Advice on careers in the marine sector for young people
We have created a page on the website for links to a huge variety of careers in the marine sector – at the end of every voyage, there will be a link to this on the back of the voyage certificates given to the young people, to give them ideas about opportunities both afloat and ashore, with options for people with different interests, skills and levels of education, and hopefully including ideas that many will never have considered, alongside the more obvious maritime roles. The page is a work in progress and we are keen to add more links, so if you have any suggestions, please send them in.
* Financial appeal
Huge thanks this week to HFW for a very generous contribution towards bursaries.
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, bank transfer or PayPal, but please do something if you possibly can. Don’t forget that if you complete and return a Gift Aid form we can claim back tax on your donation.
Raise funds for OYT South if you’re shopping online – we’ve made over £2,700 through Easyfundraising! Are you aware of the size of donations available?
We mention Easyfundraising in the newsletter each week and we’re really grateful to those people who are using it regularly, but there must be people who haven’t looked at it, or often don’t remember to do it.
Here’s what it DOESN’T do:
- Require you to buy from sources you wouldn’t normally use
- Take lots of time
- Ask you to do anything complicated at all!
- Produce donations so small you would barely notice
- Cost you a penny!
You simply have to buy whatever you already planned to buy online, from whoever you choose to shop with – but having signed up with Easyfundraising, just click to accept a donation if it’s offered when you shop. It’s often a percentage, which means the donations can be really significant for bigger items – a holiday, a flight, an expensive train ticket etc. This week we heard from a volunteer who got a £17 donation when renewing their home insurance. Someone else earned nearly £10 from a VistaPrint order. A few donations like that from a hundred supporters and it starts looking like a really significant total each year.
Do tell us if you’ve got a really good donation from something you bought – these stories help to inspire others. Maybe you even order things online for business purposes and your employer would agree to donate to us like this – at no cost to them but a way to feel good every time they need new boxes of business cards or train tickets to get staff to a conference!
It takes a minute or two to sign up to Easyfundraising: 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, often including the site you would normally choose to use for all your rainbow unicorn requirements – and it doesn’t cost you anything, you pay the same price you would pay anyway.
PLEASE click the link now and sign up!
We have already raised over £2,700 through Easyfundraising – huge thanks to everyone who has used it!
Vessel tracking – see where Prolific is sailing
Vessel tracking has been switched on again for the season – you can always have a look and see what we’re up to. This site updates every six hours so don’t worry if the vessel doesn’t appear to be moving! There are other sites (like Marine Traffic) which update more often; but especially for families of a young person on board, the tracking on our site allows you to have a look two or three times a day and see what’s going on.
OYT South social media – please share as well as liking! NB we are now on Bluesky instead of Twitter/X
If you look at the top left of any page on our website, you can click on icons for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. We are also on TikTok.
We have now updated the social media links on our website, replacing Twitter/X with Bluesky – please come and join us there!
Please share our social media posts as widely as you can – with the help of all our supporters, this charity is doing some amazing work and we need more people to hear about it. You don’t need to do anything more than share a post, or perhaps add a comment which could be as simple as “I’ve sailed with this charity!” or “I volunteer for this charity!”.
Please note that OYT South has a policy that our adult staff and volunteers should not make or accept personal online connections 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.
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 11-25, 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 11-25 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, mate 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.