In this Bulletin
Sections which have changed since last time marked *
- * Job ad: Administrator to work in our Southampton office
- * Training weekend report – and an RYA Award for our Safeguarding Officer!
- * Gipsy Moth Award for Young Volunteer of the Year
- * OYT South office staffing
- * Refit news and help needed– including volunteers’ weekend 1-2 March
- * Volunteer sea staff – voyages available
- Chris Ellis Award – win £££s of the price of your next voyage
- * Peter Tracey – a lifetime of experience
- * 2025 voyages available – NEW individual and group voyages for young people, and adult voyages
- Funding help if you want to take part in a voyage
- Events needing volunteers
- * Financial appeal
- Please contribute to Jo Clark’s leaving present
- Raise funds for OYT South if you’re shopping online – we’ve made over £2,400 through Easyfundraising!
- OYT South social media – please share as well as liking! NB OYT South is leaving Twitter/X – find us on Bluesky instead
- New readers’ welcome and introduction
- Receiving this newsletter by email
* Job ad: Administrator to work in our Southampton office
Ocean Youth Trust South is hiring!
We are recruiting an Administrator to join our industry leading team.
The successful candidate will be an experienced administrator, with an effective track record of working in a high performing and professional setting, able to take responsibility for day-to-day business routines while supporting the rest of the staff team in taking the charity forward and maintaining our place as one of the UK’s leading sail training charities.
The position is based in our office in Southampton.
Full details including job description, salary and other benefits, and how to apply.
Closing Date for Applications: Friday 21st February 2025.
Please share these details and help us find the best person to join our team and play a vital role in supporting our charitable work, delivering life-changing experiences for young people!
* Training weekend report – and an RYA Award for our Safeguarding Officer!
Huge thanks to everyone involved in our shorebased training event last weekend!
We started with a session from Halima, who first sailed with us as a 13-year-old young carer and now as an adult sails as a watchleader. She spoke to us about the experiences of young carers and bereaved children, helping us think about how we can support them on board Prolific. {Do you know a young carer or bereaved child who would benefit from a break and a fantastic fun sailing holiday? Email office@oytsouth.org to find out how we can help].
Then an update from our safeguarding team, Steve & Cathy.
On Saturday afternoon, back by popular demand: Jennie Hogan, who runs exceptionally good courses on understanding behaviour and how we can use this understanding to work more effectively with the young people who sail with us.
In the evening. Mark Todd, our CEO, reviewed the charity’s year – including the announcement of two awards. Huge congratulations to our long-standing Safeguarding Officer, Trustee and volunteer first mate Steve Lacey, who has won a Royal Yachting Association Impact Award for his work with OYT South!
The second award was our Gipsy Moth Trophy for Young Volunteer of the Year – which gets its own section in this newsletter.
Sunday saw a choice of courses, with RYA radar, first aid, a session from our office staff, and Brigid Stoney on games to play on board with young people.
A highlight for first aid was instructor Tony Salmon’s new Bluetooth resuscitation models that show you the depth and rate of compressions, effectiveness of breaths and many more stats so you can get your CPR as effective as possible. Very useful to have live feedback on your CPR technique so you can modify it and improve as needed!
Huge thanks to Annette Potter & Lynne Robbins for organising the weekend, and to Fairthorne for a great venue.
* Gipsy Moth Award for Young Volunteer of the Year
Back in 2022, Ocean Youth Trust South received a generous grant from the Gipsy Moth Trust which they asked us to spend on training and supporting young people who excel on an initial youth voyage and are working towards becoming the bosuns and watchleaders of the future.
Along with the grant came a trophy: a mounted section of the mizzen mast from Gipsy Moth IV, which after her epic 1967 voyage held the records for the fastest voyage around the world by any small vessel; the longest non-stop passage that had been made by a small sailing vessel (15,000 miles (24,000 km)); and more than twice the distance of the previous longest passage by a singlehanded sailor. These days we regularly hear of record-breaking single-handed non-stop voyages round the world, but in 1967 to see Francis Chichester circle the globe alone with only one stop was truly remarkable.
So we have a trophy which we can award annually to a volunteer aged 16-25 who has successfully made the step up from youth crew to sea staff and is excelling as a young volunteer.
This year’s winner is: Caitlin Neall-Johnston.
Caitlin was the core team volunteer for the winter refit 2023-24 and worked tirelessly through the whole winter, supporting the staff team (including a period when we were between skippers). She made a huge difference in getting Prolific ready for the 2024 season: all the successes of the year and the fantastic feedback were built on having the boat in good condition and ready on time, and we couldn’t have done it without her!
Once the season started, Caitlin quickly passed her third mate assessment and clearly has the potential to go further, when she can fit in sailing around attending university overseas.
Lauren Mackenzie, who worked with Caitlin through the refit and was Staff Mate 2023-4, said: “Caitlin was a great asset to our refit team. She has incredible leadership skills and once familiar with the routine of refit, was a great help supporting new or occasional volunteers. She was a lot of fun and introduced us to lots of Thai dishes and musical theatre. As the only full-time volunteer, she worked incredibly hard – especially somewhere so cold and far away from home. She showed impressive commitment and dedication throughout refit and I’m so excited for her next adventures around the world! I hope she continues to sail and we see her again some day”.
This year when the award was announced, there was also an honourable mention for Jack Thompson, a young volunteer who sails as a watchleader and bosun and has hugely impressed the team with his enthusiasm and commitment.
* OYT South office staffing
Unfortunately we’re short-staffed just for the moment and there’s a lot to do just now, including the recruitment process for a new Adminstrator and then training a new person once they start!. Please bear with us if you need to contact us as it may take longer than usual to deal with emails etc. If you really need an answer to something, you can always put “URGENT” in the subject line, but otherwise we’ll just get to it as soon as we can!
Meanwhile, we’re delighted to welcome Lucy Grodie, whom many of you will know as a volunteer first mate and from her previous role at ASTO. Lucy has joined us for a month just to help ensure that all sea staff qualifications, references, DBS etc are in place for the start of the season. So if you are sailing in any sea staff role this year – from skippers to trainee bosuns – and Lucy contacts you about any missing paperwork, do please reply to her as quickly as possible! In many cases, you can’t sail – and potentially the voyage can’t go ahead – unless all these things are in place.
* Refit news and help needed – including volunteers’ weekend 1-2 March
Can you come and help us during the weekend of 1-2 March? We need to do a post-refit deep clean of the boat and then get all the kit out of store and back on board. We’d be enormously grateful for all the help we can get – please email refit@oytsouth.org if you can help (and to ask about accommodation over the weekend if you need). Usual incentives … cake, good company and more!
Huge thanks to everyone who has helped at refit in the last couple of weeks: Gotch, Josh, Sara, the core team of Seb, Sasha and Shaun, regulars Chris Pryke and Anita van Nierop, plus Keri Hammond, Alisa, and Linnea Johansson.
Over the last couple of weeks there has been a huge amount of sanding and priming; then the team cleaned the hull and – over several days – applied three coats of antifoul (huge thanks to all involved including International Paints who supplied the antifoul):
Vortec has started removing some of the mast fittings and our team has been getting on with mast sanding and tackling some corrosion that was appearing behind the fittings. Vortec also did a repair to Prolific’s starboard bow, adding a sacrificial layer of fibreglass, and also worked on a small section of the keel and a fibreglass repair at the bottom of the rudder. Our team are now working on priming and antifouling these areas too.
We have also had a hatch fitted so we can remove and replace the oven, which didn’t fit through the door – was the boat built around the oven? (You would be amazed by the number of people wondering why we didn’t cut the oven up to remove it … the answer is that the new oven is a similar size and we’d really like to get it installed in one piece!)
The team has also sorted the winch servicing kit so we can order all the spare we need; chipped the sealant out of the doghouse windows where it has perished; collected the outboard (thanks to Bursledon Outboards who serviced it); and done some work on the blocks.,
They also painted the tank bearers that the tanks sit on, and Osmotech was there to put some of the tanks back in and remove the final tank.
Work has continued with servicing the seacocks – the last two were hard to reach, being deep in the bilge and with no space to get a spanner on them – thanks to Chris who sourced the specialist tools we needed!
The medical kit has gone off to MSOS to be checked and restocked.
Thanks also to Vince Brodie who has taken Sara sailing to do some coaching, with Linnea joining to lend a hand as crew!
The refit team managed all that and also fitted in the training weekend and a day at the ASTO UK Sail Training conference!
We massively appreciate everyone who has been to help – everything we achieve with young people in the sailing season depends on having the boat in good condition, and every single refit helper should feel very proud of the part they have played.
There’s still loads more work to do – please email refit@oytsouth.org if you can spare any time at all, or text Gotch or Sara or you have their numbers, or contact them via the sea staff WhatsApp groups. Age 18+ only, please.
More details about our refit here – please email refit@oytsouth.org for more information about how you can come and help, and to book yourself in. We aim to make it fun and sociable as well as getting through lots of work. And we’re always happy if anyone turns up with snacks and goodies! And for our sailing volunteers, refit is a chance to get to know bits of the boat you might not see during a normal voyage, and to improve your understanding of how things work.
* Volunteer sea staff – voyages available
Many thanks to everyone who sent in details of your availability to sail on our voyages this year. If there is anyone left who has been offered voyages and hasn’t yet confirmed your availability, do get in touch as soon as you can. If you have been in touch but you have any uncertainty at all on whether specific voyages have been confirmed for you, please let us know! And if you sent in details of your availability but don’t think you have been offered anything, please tell us ASAP! Contact caroline.white@oytsouth.org.
Whether or not you were involved in the initial round of allocations, 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 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.
16-20 April, Southampton – qualified watchleader
22-27 April, Southampton – qualified watchleader or bosun
12-16 May, Southampton to Gosport – qualified or trainee watchleader, or qualified bosun. Ideally someone who can also help with the Gosport Marine Festival on 17th May, and maybe also a maintenance day on 18th May.
19-23 May, Gosport to Southampton, qualified watchleader tbc. Ideally someone who can also help with a maintenance day on 18th May, and maybe also the Gosport Marine Festival on 17th May.
23-27 May, Southampton, qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun. This one doesn’t need sea staff joining the day before.
28 May – 1 June, Southampton, qualified watchleader.
16-21 June, Southampton, qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun.
23-28 June, Southampton, qualified watchleader. Ideally able to stay for the maintenance day on 29th June
18-23 July, Poole to Brixham – female volunteer needed – could be a qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun
30 Aug – 3 Sept, Poole to Southampton – qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun
10-14 Sept, Southampton – qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun
15-19 Sept, Southampton – qualified or trainee watchleader
6-10 Oct, Southampton – female volunteer needed – could be a qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun
14-19 Oct, Southampton – qualified watchleader and one other who could be a qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun
24-28 Oct, Southampton – qualified watchleader
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!
Chris Ellis Award – win £££s of the price of your next voyage
Anyone else want to submit an entry? We could still allow a few last-minute entries and it might be just what you need to get some funding toward one of the more expensive voyages this summer – maybe even the Tall Ships Race!
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. 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.
* Peter Tracey – a lifetime of experience
You may have read Peter Tracey’s lively account of a 1951 voyage with Ocean Youth Club founder Chris Ellis, which helped to shape the ideas that became our charity. Peter has recently written another article for us: words of advice for today’s young OYT sailors from a member of that original crew! A voyage with OYT South is often described as “the experience of a lifetime” but Peter has had a lifetime of experience. His advice may or may not be for you, but it’s definitely worth a read!
* 2025 voyages available – NEW individual and group voyages for young people, and adult voyages
Our 2025 programme has plenty of exciting opportunities to join us this year!
A lot of OYT South’s voyages are taken by organised groups such as a school, charity or youth club, who book the whole boat; but we always designate a number of voyages in school holidays for individuals who want to join a mixed group and make new friends. We have provisionally identified the first batch of individual voyages for this season (we will add more later) including some more in the summer holidays 2025:
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!
6-12 July, Le Havre to Dunkirk, £735 per person, 6 nights, age 15-25 – this is a Tall Ships Race with a fantastic festival at either end – a truly exciting adventure and a chance to create memories for a lifetime! NEARLY FULL
18-23 July, Poole to Brixham, 5 nights, age 11-25, £630 per person
30 July – 4 Aug, Brixham to Brixham, £630 per person, 5 nights – standard youth voyage for individual bookings.
11-15 August, Brixham to Brixham, £525 per person, 4 nights, age 11-16. 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 for next year, we have designated this one shorter coastal voyage as a gentler opportunity, ideal for the younger end of our age range (11-16-year-olds) and passports not required. If you know anyone who is unsure about coping with a more ambitious voyage and wants an easier introduction, this is the voyage for them!
16-21 Aug, Brixham, 5 nights, age 11-25, £630 per person
4-9 Sept, Southampton, 5 nights, age 15-25, 3 places available, £630 per person
See the 2025 programme or the availability list for other individual and group voyages.
We also have adult weekends (18+, no upper age limit) as follows:
2-4 May, Southampton, 2 nights, age range 18+, £265 per person, adult weekend voyage (Friday evening to Sunday evening)
19-12 Oct, Southampton, 2 nights, age range 18+, £265 per person, adult weekend voyage (Friday evening to Sunday evening)
Come and enjoy sailing our beautiful boat, or maybe find out what it takes to become a sailing volunteer. We may add a longer adult voyage once we can see any weeks which aren’t needed by youth groups.
Funding help if you want to take part in a voyage
Are you aged 15-25 and wanting to take part in the Le Havre to Dunkirk Tall Ships Race (see here) but needing help to afford it? Have a look at the Oman Bursaries scheme and see if you might be eligible to apply.
If you have sailed with us in the past and earned a recommendation to join our volunteer training programme, you can ask us about funding towards a crew berth on the race or another of the more ambitious voyages which isn’t suitable for a brand-new inexperienced volunteer in a staff berth. The Gipsy Moth Fund is only open to people aged 16-25 who have had a volunteer recommendation from one of our skippers. You just need to tell us which voyage you want to do and how much you can afford to contribute, and we’ll see if we can fund the shortfall.
If you sailed with us last year but aren’t involved as a trainee volunteer (including under-16s) consider the Chris Ellis Award.
We also have a standard bursaries programme open to anyone aged 25 or under who wants to sail with us but can’t afford the full cost, whether or not you have sailed with us before, with grants available from a range of different donors. To apply, you need to email us with details of any personal circumstances relevant to why you can’t afford to sail without help; what you want to achieve and why you want to take part; which voyage you want to do (or some options for different possible voyages); and how much you can afford to contribute. You need to think hard about what, if anything, you can raise – bursary applications won’t be considered if they simply ask how much you can have, or request “as much as possible”: your application has to come after serious thought about anything else you can put in. This doesn’t mean we can’t grant 100% bursaries in exceptional circumstances, but we would need to understand why. Our funds are limited and if one person gets a very large grant, someone else may get nothing at all, so it’s important only to ask for as much as you genuinely need.
Events needing volunteers
This year Prolific will be open to visitors at the South Coast Boat Show in Ocean Village on the weekend of 10th-11th May, and at the Gosport marine festival on 17th May. We will need lots of people to show visitors around the boat and talk about our work – please put the dates in your diary and contact webmaster1@oytsouth.org if you are interested in helping!
* Financial appeal
Big thanks this week to the family and friends of Ewan Hind, who very sadly died in December, aged 46, shortly after completing an Atlantic crossing. We are very touched that Ewan’s family have decided to raise funds for a bursary in his memory, to help young people sail with OYT South. OYT South’s CEO Mark Todd was a friend of Ewan’s and says: “Ewan was a tremendous sailor, a kind man, a wonderful father and husband. In my role I have met many great sailors and Ewan was one of them. Modest and always helpful. I never ceased to be in awe of all he knew. I feel lucky to have known him.” OYT South will work with the family to ensure that the bursary fund is used in a way that honours Ewan’s memory.
Many thanks also to ASTO for the latest Hammond Innes bursary payment.
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.
Please contribute to Jo Clark’s leaving present!
Very sadly we had to say goodbye to Jo who left us before Christmas. She had been working for the charity since 2018 but decided she needs to spend more time with her husband who is working overseas.
Jo joined us in 2018 as Operations Assistant and has worked for the charity in several posts, including Admin Manager, before becoming part-time Volunteer and Membership Manager, in which role she became the key person for looking after our volunteer sea staff. (The email address seastaffadmin@oytsouth.org is still in use and will be looked after by other members of the office team for the time being).
Jo brought a fantastic blend of efficiency and creativity to the role over the years – do have a look at some of the short stories she contributed to illustrate our Sail To Wellbeing programme!
Jo played a great part in the successes of the charity in the last six years, which of course included the very challenging period of the pandemic and all the joys and complications of returning to sailing after that. We’ll be sorry to lose her and we wish her all the best for the future.
We’ll keep Jo’s leaving present fund open for a little while longer – if you would like to contribute, there’s a donation link here.
Raise funds for OYT South if you’re shopping online – we’ve made over £2,400 through Easyfundraising!
“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!”
We have already raised over £2,400 through Easyfundraising – huge thanks to everyone who has used it!
OYT South social media – please share as well as liking! NB OYT South is leaving Twitter/X – find us on Bluesky instead
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 just 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.