In this Bulletin
Sections which have changed since last time marked *
- First mate job ad – just over two weeks to go!
- * Last few places for young people this summer!
- * Voyage news
- * Volunteer sea staff bookings – PLEASE help!
- 2027 sailing programme
- Sea Staff awards – nominations welcome
- Adult voyages
- Planning a gap year, or not working over the winter? Join our refit core team!
- Dates for your diary
- Vessel tracking
- Financial appeal
- Police Dog Hogan
- Raise funds for OYT South if you’re shopping online – we’ve made over £3,000 through Easyfundraising! Are you aware of the size of donations available?
- OYT South social media – please share as well as liking!
- Chris Ellis Award – win £££s of the price of your next voyage
- New readers’ welcome and introduction
- Receiving this newsletter by email
First mate news job ad – just over two weeks to go!
If you have seen recent newsletters you will know that Sara Abdur, first mate and ball of energy and joy, comes to the end of her two years in post in November and is going to go off and spread her wings and look to broaden her experience beyond OYT South – which means we are looking for a great new Staff First Mate. All the details here, including job description, person specification, salary, and qualifications required. Closing date for applications is midday Monday 31st August. Feel free to contact caroline.white@oytsouth.org if you have any questions before applying.
* Last few places for young people this summer!
The 2026 programme is on the website and there is an availability list here.
There is just ONE voyages left this summer which still has spaces – please spread the word and let’s fill the last few places!
31 Aug – 4 Sept, Poole to Southampton, 4 nights, £540 per person. The age range for this one was not originally specified other than our general 11-25 range; but in practice bookings so far are aged 17-24. At least four places left.
If those dates don’t suit you, have a look at our 2027 programme!
* Voyage news
It was lovely last week to welcome back a crew from MACS (https://macs.org.uk/), the charity for children born without eyes or with underdeveloped eyes. Many of them had sailed with us before and are good friends, with their visual impairments no barrier to taking a full part in an exciting, challenging and hugely enjoyable voyage. There were some new members of the crew this year so there was a little understandable trepidation!
The welcome briefings and introductions were filmed by Matt, a videographer who is making a documentary showing how visual impairment need not prevent young people from taking part in everyday life, adventure and challenging activities. He covered lifejackets and safety procedures to the more practical mysteries of marine toilets and managing a galley at sea. Although he couldn’t sail with them, his drone followed their departure from Brixham towards Dartmouth and we are all very much looking forward to seeing the finished documentary later in the year.
The wildlife clearly wanted to welcome the crew too. Within half an hour of leaving Brixham they were joined by a pod of dolphins, giving everyone an unforgettable start to the voyage. Crew members headed out onto the bowsprit, where they were able to enjoy a mother and young dolphin darting through the waves around Prolific’s bow.
Once alongside in Dartmouth the crew had a run ashore before dinner, and afterwards filled out personal logbooks and enjoyed a couple of bedtime stories.
On Friday they had breakfast under way followed by taking turns helming and having a safety equipment deck walk.
They then did winch drills:
As those were completed, the Polish Tall Ship Dar Młodzieży appeared in the distance. Prolific did some quick sail hoists, putting up the main mizzen and staysail in quick succession and went to say hello and wave.
Later they dropped the sails and headed into Fowey and picked up a mooring buoy.
A lovely sausages and wedges dinner (with many many many many wedges….), followed by the usual bedtime routine of washing up, chart chat, logbooks and then lights out with a bedtime story.
On Saturday they did a dry man overboard recovery exercise alongside and then the crew had a wander ashore into Fowey, using the water taxi, followed by a lovely day sailing back towards an anchorage in Wembury Bay.
A quick dinner and then everyone went ashore by dinghy for a fireworks display.
On Sunday morning they filled out logbooks and did some theory sessions on knots and rules of the road. Sails were hoisted as they lifted the anchor and waved at skipper Andy’s family as they sailed past on their own boat Pantalaimon.
Next stop was Salcombe, ferrying people to the beach to have a BBQ.
They spent Monday morning in Salcombe, being ferried ashore by the harbour master, and then slipped after lunch and sailed along the coast, going close to Start Point and doing some gybing practice.
Back in Brixham they tidied the boat and filled the fresh water tanks before having dinner, more logbooks, chart chats, a safety chat and a final bedtime story: Oh The Places You’ll Go! The crew headed home on Tuesday. They had sailed 137 nautical miles and you can see their voyage track here.
Skipper Andy Brown writes: “For several of the young people this was a return voyage. The attraction is not simply the sailing and adventure, but also the opportunity to spend time with friends who understand many of the same challenges. It was a real pleasure to watch those friendships develop and to see just how much fun the crew had together. Prolific provides a wonderful environment in which young people from across the UK, brought together through MACS, can share experiences, build confidence and simply enjoy being with their friends.
As skipper, this was my fourth voyage with a MACS crew, and I have thoroughly enjoyed every one of them.
Our sea staff were, as ever, outstanding. They embraced the additional challenges of supporting a visually impaired crew without hesitation, adapting where necessary while making sure that everyone was able to participate as fully and independently as possible. Their patience, kindness and good humour shone through throughout the week – accompanied by a great many laughs and giggles.
The week demonstrated perfectly what OYT South voyages are all about: young people being challenged, discovering what they can achieve, making friends, having adventures and, above all, having a great deal of fun along the way.
A huge thanks to the MACS organisers, our sea staff, Sara, Josh, Jack Dignan, Graeme Findlay, Sarah Kenwright, Sam Murray and Rayne Mirzababaeva for making this possible, also a huge thanks to the onshore team in the background, Lynne, Annette, Richard etc. you are all stars.” Huge thanks also to Andy!
Voyage feedback from the MACS group included:
“The trips just get better and better each year! So many fun and exciting things happened it would take ages to list them all! Thank you so much for an amazing voyage and I really hope to be able to come and sail again! :-) … Best bit: there was so many amazing things – being out on the bowsprit on the last day and the dolphins were all swimming underneath and we saw so many baby ones as well, that was just… I have never seen baby dolphins before, that was brilliant.”
“The trip this year was beyond amazing as always. So many memories made. Thank you to all of the sea staff for all their hard work and thank you for taking the time to teach me new things and allowing me to lead a mainsail hoist. These voyages have changed my life and I will never forget … My best bit… there was so many amazing things with this voyage but I really enjoyed getting involved with the sailing and learning more about the boat. I loved leading the main hoist and being on the bowsprit getting the jib down and I learnt a lot about rules of the road and generally how the boat works. That was really interesting … My least favourite bit is definitely going home because these days have flown by and I feel like I could do with so much longer. I love it on board.”
“Best trip so far, really enjoyed meeting the new crew members and had a lot more laughs and a lot less stress.”
“I had a lovely week this week. Had lots of fun sailing around the south coast and learning new skills. Everyone was so lovely. Thank you! :-) … Most lasting memory: being on the bowsprit and the dolphins going under, that was really nice and really pretty.”
“Thanks for another great trip. I had a great time like always. This trip and all the previous trips has helped me be the person I am today. Thanks for being part of my life. I will remember these trips for life, so many memories … My best bit … Most of it was brilliant, joking around all the time and everybody was just, I don’t know, being them, basically, that’s what I like.”
“Really enjoyed meeting new friends and maybe singing and dancing on the boat.”
“Most lasting memory: probably seeing dolphins up close because I’ve never been able to see dolphins very well in the water and seeing them so close to the boat and seeing the baby dolphins it really was, I think, one of the coolest things I have ever seen in my life, it really was so cool – thank you to everyone you have all made it such an amazing week.”
“My favourite but was the whole trip, but I would say the fireworks and the BBQ and showers of course and just getting to know everyone on the boat.”
“The best bit and probably the most memorable as well is when we did the wave to the other boat and started howling at them.”
“The best moment I had was spending time with all the crew having a good time.”
This week’s voyage is with a mixed crew of individual bookings, but set aside for a younger age group (11-16) as so many of our other individual voyages are older. They joined on Wednesday afternoon and had a truly memorable start to their voyage as they set off in time to enjoy the eclipse at sea (we had ordered a box of eclipse glasses before they became scarce); and they had dolphins playing around the boat as the eclipse progressed.
They carried on sailing all through the night, enjoying the Perseid meteor shower, and were on the buoy in Falmouth by midday yesterday.
The crew had some time ashore, and Prolific had a visit from Miles Carden, the CEO of Falmouth Harbour.
This morning those who hadn’t already done it were working towards RYA Start Yachting or Competent Crew qualifications and those who already had CC were given the task of planning and running the pilotage out of Falmouth. They are aiming to be in Cawsand tonight.
Big thanks to sea staff Mark, Sara, Josh, David Dent, Annant Shah, Andrew Page and Rayne Mirzababaeva.
* Volunteer sea staff bookings – PLEASE help!
Please do get in touch if you can help with any of these!
26-29 Sept, Southampton – qualified watchleader or bosun needed
28 Oct – 1 Nov, Southampton – qualified watchleader
2 Nov – qualified watchleaders for day sail
Please send offers or questions to webmaster1@oytsouth.org.
2027 sailing programme
Our 2027 sailing programme is now on the website and we are OPEN for group bookings (full-boat bookings for 12-15 young people). Please contact caroline.white@oytsouth.org to discuss voyage options for a school, charity, local authority or youth group.
There are currently a couple of voyages showing on the programme as designated for individual bookings in school summer holidays and these are now open for bookings (one is our annual shorter UK-only voyage for 11-16-year olds, the other is open to people up to the age of 25) but the intention is to add at least another four individual voyages soon – please contact us if you would like to be informed when the full set of individual voyages is confirmed.
There are also two 2027 adult weekends – ideal for new prospective volunteers to come and find out more!
Sea Staff awards – nominations welcome
Regular readers will know that in recent years we have had our annual Gipsy Moth Award for Young Volunteer of the Year (aged 25 and under) – the current holder is Jack Thompson. But we have never had an award specifically for over-25 volunteers. This season, we are introducing the Brian Eyres Award, in memory of our late Skipper and Treasurer. Brian exemplified the best of volunteering, ashore and afloat, for OYT South as well as a range of other causes – he did so much in his lifetime and this award will be a way to recognise and remember his huge contribution to the OYC and to OYT South.
The Brian Eyres Award is not for long service or similar (we now have a series of long-service certificates for every five years that a volunteer spends with us). Instead, we want people to nominate volunteers if you see them doing something particularly impressive or heart-warming, ashore or afloat, in 2026. This could be something as simple as being the watchleader who took time to turn things round for a scared and unhappy young person on board; or the person who did a tough job in miserable conditions when no-one else wanted to do it; or someone who invented a brilliant activity to raise morale. It might be something which saved a voyage, but equally it could be something that no-one even noticed except you. Please email webmaster1@oytsouth.org with your nominations. Don’t worry about the age of the volunteer you are nominating – if we get anything for someone aged 25 and under, we can take it into account in the discussions about the Gipsy Moth Award (which is a collective decision by all the paid staff).
Nominations can come from anyone – other volunteers, staff, young people, parents and carers, clients, group leaders.
At the end of the year we will ask someone to look at nominations for the Brian Eyres Award and choose a winner to be announced at the next training weekend.
Adult voyages
There’s one more adult weekend this season, and two next year:
9-11 Oct 2026, Southampton, 2 nights, age range 18+, £270 per person, adult weekend voyage (Friday evening to Sunday evening) – provisionally fully booked but please ask if you would like to go on the waiting list in case anyone drops out.
23-25 April 2027, Southampton, 2 nights, age range 18+, £275 per person, adult weekend voyage (Friday evening to Sunday evening)
17-19 Sept 2027, Southampton, 2 nights, age range 18+, £275 per person, adult weekend voyage (Friday evening to Sunday evening)
These weekends are ideal for people who want to find out more about the possibility of volunteering with us – but you are also welcome if you simply want to come along and enjoy a sail on board Prolific! Contact us to ask about booking.
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.
Dates for your diary
Prolific has planned maintenance days this year and we always need lots of help (skilled or unskilled) – email refit@oytsouth.org to book yourself in for any of these:
Sunday 23rd August – Brixham
Monday 12th October – Southampton
The 2026 OYT South AGM and Curry Night will be on Saturday 7th November.
Looking even further ahead, the next shorebased volunteers’ training weekend is set for 5th-7th February 2027 – keep it free!
Vessel tracking
Prolific’s vessel tracking is available on our website – you can look at any time to see where we are and where we have been sailing. Big thanks to Millennium who built us a whole new tracking system when the one we used to use was discontinued!
Financial appeal
We need a regular flow of funds to cover at least three major areas: bursaries for young people who could not otherwise afford to sail; vessel maintenance and equipment; and staff salaries – please help, or pass on our details to anyone you come across who might make a grant, large or small.
See here for how to make a donation – you can contribute by cheque, 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.
Police Dog Hogan
Regular readers will know that our Trustee Eddie Bishop plays the fiddle in the band Police Dog Hogan. They are playing in Exeter on Saturday 5th December, and then three nights in London, at the Half Moon, Putney, on 14th, 15th and 16th December. There will be OYT South people at several of these shows – come and join us – tickets here. You can find the band on YouTube if you haven’t heard their music before:
Raise funds for OYT South if you’re shopping online – we’ve made over £3,000 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. For example, one volunteer 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 £3,000 through Easyfundraising – huge thanks to everyone who has used it!
OYT South social media – please share as well as liking!
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, and these days we recommend Bluesky rather than Twitter/X – 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.
Chris Ellis Award – win £££s of the price of your next voyage
Open for 2026 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.
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.