In this Bulletin
Sections which have changed since last time marked *
- * 2025 individual voyages available – LAST FEW places for young people this year!
- * Voyage news
- 2026 voyages
- 2025 and 2026 adult voyages
- Volunteer sea staff vacancies – can you help?
- Planning a gap year, or not working over the winter? Join our refit core team!
- AGM and curry night 2025 – a date for your diary
- Fundraising event in Goodwood House – with Libby Purves – volunteers needed
- * Shorebased training weekend February 2026
- Vessel tracking – see where Prolific is sailing as we go on our adventures!
- Prolific maintenance days – help needed
- Chris Ellis Award – win £££s of the price of your next voyage
- * Financial appeal
- Raise funds for OYT South if you’re shopping online – we’ve made over £2,800 through Easyfundraising! Are you aware of the size of donations available?
- 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
* 2025 individual voyages available – LAST FEW places for young people this year!
Our 2025 programme still has a few 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:
11-15 August, Brixham to Brixham, 4 nights, age 11-16, £525 per person – only 2 places left
30 Aug – 3 Sept, Poole to Southampton, 4 nights, age 11-25, £525 per person – tbc, please ask about spaces.
29 Oct – 2 Nov, Southampton, 4 nights, age 11-25, £545 per person – half term -– up to 8 places available tbc.
Other voyages are all fully-booked but there is always the possibility of a cancellation, perhaps even at the last minute if someone is ill, for example. So do please let us know if you would like to go on a mailing list to be contacted about short-notice vacancies.
Email voyageadmin@oytsouth.org to ask about individual bookings.
* Voyage news
Last week’s newsletter left a mixed crew of individual bookings in Cawsand and planning to head for Fowey. This was a relatively short day – force 4 in flat water with the wind blowing off the land: a very enjoyable sail!
On arrival they did a man overboard recovery drill. The Fowey classic racing week was on, there were several beautiful classic yachts sailing, and the local lifeboats did a parade just outside the harbour. There were actually so many boats that Prolific could not initially get into the harbour! But after dropping sails and waiting 20 minutes, the traffic cleared enough to allow the crew to head in to this very pretty harbour.
They rafted alongside a wooden gaffer called Annie of Charlestown in the middle of the river and then had dinner and played games on board.
The following morning the young people went ashore to explore Fowey on a very busy and touristy Saturday.
Next they sailed across to Mevagissey, and did an exercise getting used to the different points of sail and how to manoeuvre Prolific and adjust for the wind direction.
They then avoided many lobster pots with the young people keeping a very good lookout for them, before anchoring. Most of the young people went to the beach and built an entire miniature town out of sand including a scale version of Mount Everest.
Three of the young people stayed on board to receive further coaching on reefing to complete that section of their RYA Competent Crew qualification – others either had Competent Crew already or were newer to sailing and doing the less demanding Start Yachting syllabus.
Next morning it was grey and the visibility was low with fine rain. The three Competent Crew candidates paddled the dinghy around Prolific:
Then after some preparations they left and headed back towards Brixham with two reefs in the mizzen, one reef in the main and a staysail. The wind picked up fairly quickly and was above the forecasted wind as we had a sustained force 6 or a few hours and the motion of the boat was quite challenging for some. As they got around Start Point the sea state flattened out and the sun appeared:
They were followed by a stunning pod of dolphins.
They sailed into the middle of Tor Bay, dropped sails and anchored near Torquay for dinner. Once darkness fell, they executed the short passage into Brixham. The young people did an excellent job of keeping a lookout and steering in the dark.
The voyage ended after 172 nautical miles and you can see their voyage track here. Nine people earned RYA Start Yachting certificates and three got the more advanced Competent Crew qualification.
Their feedback included:
“An experience of a lifetime. The sea staff are trained and capable beyond any expectation. A privilege to sail with such an incredible charity. Best bit: definitely the kingdom we made out of sand at the beach, we had a lot of participants and a lot of work done there. Most lasting memory: when we were on a broad reach on the last day sailing back to Brixham and it was quite cloudy but we were going quite fast, we had good wind and just getting really engaged in the sailing we were doing. We were doing gybes and having to adjust sheets quite frequently and it was quite a tough point of sail generally so I thoroughly enjoyed being involved with that and having that privilege.”
“Most lasting memory: Being on the bowsprit with the dolphins. That was pretty cool.”
“Thank you to all that made the trip so great – crew and staff. It was an unforgettable experience and I will be back again!”
“Had lots of fun. Learnt a lot of new skills involving sailing. The crew and staff were very kind and patient. A good experience.”
“A very good and exciting experience, where I learnt how to sail and all about it. It was amazing.”
“Despite being violently sick I had such a good time & learnt so so much that nothing could ruin the great time I had. Thank You! Best bit: absolutely everything I learnt while being here, it’s been really really interesting and I’ve really really enjoyed it. And we also have a genuinely really good crew, everyone really got along and I really kinda appreciated that. Most lasting memory: when we docked in I think Fowey with the boat next to us and just the views that we had and seeing all the racing ships go by. it was really really cool.”
“Seeing dolphins was sick, good boat, great crew.”
“Thank you for a great trip, I’ve learnt so much in just a week and really enjoyed all of it!”
Big thanks to sea staff Gotch, Brigid Stoney, Sara, Rooby Vaughan-Woods, Rebecca Brookes, Adeana Rowan and Tori Pickles.
This week’s voyage has been with MACS (Microphthalmia, Anophthalmia & Coloboma Support) for children born without eyes or with under-developed eyes. Some of them have sailed with us for many years and it is always lovely to have them back on board.
They joined in Brixham on Tuesday, all excited for adventure / ice creams / dolphins. After settling in with briefings, they headed to Dartmouth where the boat filled up with water and the crew filled out their logbooks, before a restful night and a big day ahead.
On Wednesday they were up at 7am for a big sail to Falmouth. They had breakfast under way and then the crew got stuck in with hoisting main and mizzen – unfortunately there was no wind so they motored all the way, with dolphins and sunshine.
Outside Falmouth they had a Mexican wave competition with another sail training vessel.
Then fire drills and a man overboard recovery drill, with the young people excellent at keeping themselves safe and following procedure.
Thee had time ashore – a wander around town and a milkshake.
Next morning they had showers ashore before heading out and finding WIND! Great teamwork got the main, mizzen and staysail up and they gybed all the way to Cawsand where they anchored.
That night there was a big wash up round the table – people will be happy to know that our broken disco lights have been replaced ….
This morning they were heading for Salcombe and hoping for a BBQ,
The crew all meshed really well and have given 100% enthusiasm, not letting their differences stop them from attempting anything – we’ve had people looking at a chart by using tactile maps, and sail models out to show how sail hoists work.
Big thanks to sea staff Constantinos, Adam Lane, Sara, Jack Thompson, Hannah Blyton, Lizzie Miller, Tyler Grant and Theo McKay.
Crew feedback in the next issue!
2026 voyages
Do you know a school or youth club or another organisation which might like an exclusive booking for 12-15 people?
The 2026 programme is now available on the website but at this early stage it is still subject to changes. If you are interested in a 2026 booking, please ask.
2025 and 2026 adult voyages
This year’s October adult weekend (10-12 Oct, Southampton) now has a waiting list – email for details or to be added to the list.
2026 volunteer adult weekends are open for bookings:
24-26 April 2026, Southampton, 2 nights, age range 18+, £270 per person, adult weekend voyage (Friday evening to Sunday evening)
9-11 Oct 2026, Southampton, 2 nights, age range 18+, £270 per person, adult weekend voyage (Friday evening to Sunday evening)
Volunteer sea staff vacancies – can you help?
These are the spaces still available this season – 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.
27-30 Sept, Southampton – qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun
6-10 Oct, Southampton – qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun
14-19 Oct, Southampton – qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun
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!
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.
We’ll also need lots of casual volunteers helping for a day, a few days or a weekend, but we can get people booked in for that much nearer the time – at this stage we are really just thinking about the core team.
AGM and curry night 2025 – a date for your diary
Our AGM and social evening will be 8th November – save the date! You can see the details and book your curry here.
Fundraising event in Goodwood House – with Libby Purves – volunteers needed
If you enjoyed the recent article in the Times about us by Libby Purves, come and hear her speak!
Thanks to our friends at Ned’s Fund there will be a fundraising event for OYT South on Thursday 6th November in historic Goodwood House – save the date and we will let you know when tickets go on sale. We will also need two or three volunteers to help on the night – handing out drinks and leaflets – is anyone interested? Email caroline.white@oytsouth.org.
* Shorebased training weekend February 2026
Next year’s OYT South training weekend for staff and volunteers will run from 7pm on Friday 6th February to 4pm on Sunday 8th February at a new venue, Foxlease Park, Clay Hill, Lyndhurst, Hampshire, SO43 7DE. As last year, all accommodation and meals will be available on site.
We will announce a schedule and prices in due course, once we have a full programme, but we can already confirm that we will be offering the RYA First Aid course (updates required every three years – check when yours goes out of date) and an accredited Mental Health First Aid Awareness course. There will also be a course on sail repairs, splicing etc., and a session with a behaviour expert recommended by one of our school clients, with a great track record of showing how to get the best out of young people. And there should be an opportunity to do the GMDSS exam for your radio licence.
Very soon we will be able to publish a detailed programme (some of these courses will run at the same time so you will have to choose) and start taking bookings!
Vessel tracking – see where Prolific is sailing as we go on our adventures!
Prolific is away from our home base in Southampton for the summer!
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.
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.
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.
* Financial appeal
Big thanks this week to a kind donor for a very generous contribution toward bursaries for young people who cannot otherwise afford to sail, and to the Royal Thames Yacht Club charity for bursary funding for two specific voyages. Special thanks also to Helly Hanson for donating funds raised at an event with our vice patron Pip Hare.
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 £2,800 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 £2,800 through Easyfundraising – huge thanks to everyone who has used it!
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.