In this Bulletin
Sections which have changed since last time marked *
- * Prolific maintenance days – including THIS Saturday – help needed
- * Voyage news
- * Volunteer sea staff – spaces that MUST be filled – can you help?
- * #Volunteers’ Week
- * Do you need a Powerboat Level 2 qualification (required for driving Prolific’s dinghy)
- * Shorebased training weekend February 2026
- * 2025 individual voyages available – individual bookings for young people
- * 2025 group voyages – and plans for 2026
- 2025 adult voyages available
- 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
* Prolific maintenance days – including THIS Saturday – 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; or for THIS WEEKEND’s maintenance day, call the boat phone 07990 518915. 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.
Saturday 7th June – Southampton
Sunday 29th June – Southampton
Friday 22nd August – Brixham
Monday 13th October– Southampton
* Voyage news
The last newsletter ended halfway through a voyage with students from Beaulieu Park School in Essex. We left them in Gosport on Friday morning just about to set off on a big adventurous day. The weather was just right for sailing around the Isle of Wight so they set off around 10am and headed towards Bembridge to hoist sails.
It was sunny with clouds and turquoise seas. They headed off upwind, tacking up to Sandown Bay, looking at the stunning tree-covered cliffs with a really beautiful colour to the water. Then on around St Catherine’s Point, where the sea got a little confused over the overfalls. The wind dropped beyond the point and they hoisted the jib.
By this time the tide was with them and they were doing more than 10 knots over the ground. The young people went out on the bowsprit and thoroughly enjoyed the feeling of soaring over the ocean!
They sailed past Compton Bay and approached Freshwater and the Needles, where they gybed their way downwind, goose-winging the jib and the staysail. They could see where the sandbanks were due to the turbulent water and there was also a lumpy sea state over the entrance to the channel at the bridges. With the tide initially against them it took an hour to sail down the Needles channel.
They started dropping the sails and with potential fog in the forecast the air started to feel moist. They proceeded to an anchorage in Ryde under a beautiful red sunset and dropped the anchor for dinner.
Overnight there was not even a breath of wind and when they woke in the morning there was thick fog all around. This wasn’t unexpected and they also knew that later that day when the wind came in, the fog would lift.
They spent the morning at anchor and the young people planned the pilotage back to Ocean Village.
They then had sessions on points of sail, knots and parts of the boat as well as sources of weather as part of the YA Start Yachting syllabus. Then a break with some chill time on deck followed by lots of games. The fog was starting to lift at this point and they weighed anchor and the young people took it in turns with their watches to navigate back to Ocean Village.
They had dinner and then a movie night on board. After breakfast next day they had a big boat clean and then a recap of the voyage and gave out certificates – the whole crew had completed the RYA Start Yachting qualification.
They sailed 115 miles and you can see the complete voyage track here.
Feedback included:
“I absolutely loved the experience. Learnt lots of new skills and gave me a new found appreciation for sailing. Raised the bar for school trips massively.”
“I loved it. It was really good … And take all the jobs you can. Best bit: When we steered the ship ourselves with a little bit of help.”
“I have enjoyed this soo much and I loved the staff – they were all so kind and caring! I’ve grown closer to so many people and learnt so many skills and so many memories.”
“I love Prolific!! Thank you very much for the experience, was a great opportunity to learn and connect!!”
“I loved learning new skills and creating new memories and experiences. I had an amazing time! Thank you so much :)”
“It was really cool having new experiences and would love to go again.”
“I enjoyed learning new skills and learning things about the boat.”
“It was very good – enjoyed it lots and got closer to my teammates.”
And from the two accompanying staff:
“Thoroughly enjoyed the voyage. Great sea staff and lots of fun and positive experiences. I learned a lot and brilliant to see the youth having fun and working so well as a team.”
“It has been absolutely amazing. A wonderful experience and one I would love to repeat. My most favourite part was going around the Island and seeing the sails up, that was fabulous.”
Big thanks to sea staff Gotch, Sara, Glyn Collins, Clara Theil and Andrew Page who are both working hard on second mate assessments, Chris Threapleton who is working towards third mate, and Will Durham who made a great start on his first voyage as sea staff having earned his recommendation on a voyage in the Easter holidays.
This week we have been sailing with another crew from Harris Merton school in London. Gotch says they are a lovely group and getting loads out of it – despite the weather having turned against them this week!
They joined on Monday and after introductions and briefings, headed down to Cowes in 30 knots of wind.
Once there they started work on their personal logbooks and had dinner.
Tuesday was simply too windy for sailing and they did lots of work on knots, weather, safety and more:
In the evening skipper Gotch took them for a tour of Cowes. Being from a big city, watching the sunset from the beach was a great experience for many of them. He also showed them the Fastnet memorial and explained about the 1979 race. On the way back they passed the Royal Ocean Racing Club and were very impressed to discover that their skipper is a member! He told them all about it and how to get into racing, and they were able to take photos on the steps.
On Wednesday the weather was still unfriendly but not too bad to sail. They set the boat up for a windy day and headed out with three reefs in the main, a reefed mizzen and the staysail. They had a good sail in the eastern Solent and then anchored for dinner before heading down to Lymington for the night.
Yesterday they sailed back up the Solent and the young people took charge of a pilotage plan which took them all the way to Ocean Village.
You can see their voyage track here and we will include their feedback in the next issue. Big thanks to sea staff Gotch, Glyn Collins, Lucinda Neall, Keri Hammond, and special congratulation to Theo Bennison for completing his second mate assessment and to Si Brammer and Ed Gordon-Thomson who were both signed off as third mates!
This voyage was a challenge as we had a number of changes of staff, for unavoidable reasons, and in the end we covered the week with some volunteers arriving early or leaving late, but giving as much time as they possibly could to make it a successful voyage. We are really grateful to everyone who went to this trouble to help us out, and to the whole team for managing so well – it’s never ideal to have staff changes during a voyage but this team did everything they could to handle it without disruption to the young people.
* Volunteer sea staff – spaces that MUST be filled – can you help?
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.
16-21 June, Southampton – qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun
12-17 July, Dunkirk to Poole – – qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun – an opportunity to see the Tall Ships festival in Dunkirk!
18-23 July, Poole to Brixham – ideally a female volunteer needed, but anyone else please get in touch if you can do these dates!
23-29 August, Brixham to Poole – qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun
27-30 Sept, Southampton – one or two watchleaders or a bosun (qualified or trainee)
1-5 Oct, Southampton – two watchleaders or 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.
* #Volunteers’ Week
This is Volunteers’ Week and we have been doing a series of social media posts all week about what volunteers do on board, why they do it and what they get out of it. But we would like to take this opportunity to thank and celebrate every single person who volunteers for the charity, in any capacity. We have some amazing people involved with OYT South and some phenomenal levels of support, and we really can’t thank you enough.
This week we were sent a copy of a report written by one of our school clients for a donor who helped to fund their voyage. This Is just a short extract from that report, on the impact a voyage has on their students:
“The leap forward we see in them in the week they are away with OYT South is fantastic to see and cannot be underestimated. When we talk about real breakthrough moments with children, this is what these voyages can provide and we can then embed which is huge for making a concrete and sustained positive difference in our children’s life.”
Every single person involved with OYT South should be proud of what we can achieve together. And in Volunteers’ Week especially, we wanted to take a moment to appreciate the volunteers who play a part in earning feedback like this.
* 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.
* 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 3 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 left due to a cancellation
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
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 aim to send a draft programme for 2026 to all current clients before the end of June 2025. If you have any unusual requests for voyage dates, ports or durations, please tell us NOW as it may not be too late to write something into the programme for you.
Please ask if you are a new potential group client and would like to be added to the mailing list for the new draft programme.
2025 adult voyages 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.
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 Kit Power for another very kind donation, and to the Baxter and Grimshaw Trust for another 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.