In this Bulletin
Sections which have changed since last time marked *
- * Voyage news
- * Volunteer sea staff bookings – PLEASE help!
- Sea Staff awards – nominations welcome
- Individual bookings for summer 2026
- Adult voyages
- * Planning a gap year, or not working over the winter? Join our refit core team!
- 2026 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 £2,900 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
* Voyage news
The last newsletter saw our first mixed individuals’ crew of the summer making their way back from Alderney towards Weymouth.
It was a glass calm sea, so since they were motoring rather than sailing, the young people were set the challenge of getting back with no use of digital navigation but only traditional methods, which they did the whole way across and it placed Prolific in Weymouth perfectly!
On the way across, people spent lots of time out on the bowsprit:
Next day the sails went up as they headed east for Studland:
It was a very hot day and these are pictures of the crew in Studland:
They waited until sunset so the young people could take charge of a night navigation exercise into Poole.
The voyage ended in Poole on Friday. They had completed 200 miles at sea and you can see their full voyage track here.
Feedback included:
“I’ve only done two trips, but this was without doubt the best experience I have ever had with OYT South and I hope I can do more in the future. Amazing crew, leaders. Cannot say enough how grateful I am for this trip … The best bit was being able to go to the Channel Islands for the first time. It was really beautiful and I’m glad I got to experience that … I’ve loved the whole thing from the start to the end. It’s been honestly the best that I’ve ever done.”
“I learnt so much on this trip and had a fantastic time getting to know everyone. Special shout out to skipper James for being so patient and approachable. I made so many fantastic memories I’m sure will last a lifetime! … I think my best bit was like the bits we got to do by ourselves. So like when I parked the boat up in Alderney. It was a bit terrifying but it was really interesting and I’ve learnt a lot because I had to do it by myself, and then the navigation as well in the night.”
“Fantastic trip and really special opportunity to get into sailing – made some brilliant memories … Best bit was probably just being like sat out on the bean bags, and like with the music blasting and a book and really good company and joking … It was just really good fun. The least favourite bit was like the noise, you guys are extremely noisy when everyone is all together and it can be a little bit much but it was good fun as well. It’s chaos and its good and bad. The most memorable bit was probably being on the boat on the bowsprit and just like lying in the netting with my face down. It felt like I was flying and seeing the water underneath.”
“I had so much fun, the crew was amazing and everyone got on really well as a big community. 10/10 would definitely do again!”
“Learnt a lot more about navigating the ship using the classic methods. This was very fun due to the extra skills needed to learn these.”
“Had an amazing time learning to sail and live on a boat. Had some great times and fun swims. Thanks! … My most memorable bit was probably when we were like crossing the Channel and you couldn’t see any land or anything and it was just the sea. It was really cool.”
“Absolutely amazing experience! I loved every second! Huge respect for everyone on board.”
“Such an amazing experience to get to know people and learn and progress with sailing.”
“Amazing second trip. Looking forward to returning! Thanks … The best bit was going to Alderney, it just such a beautiful place and wandering round, and being with everyone and playing games and BBQ and everything. The worst bit was just the general stickiness and the heat and the sun cream and the salt and the sand and the sleeping and being with everything just sticky all the time. That was really bad.”
“My most memorable bit will probably be the colour of the water at Alderney. It was so pretty.”
“Thank you so much! It was my first time sailing and I will be going again as I loved it so much. The people were so nice and the food was better than expected so that was nice :-)”
“My most memorable bit probably watching England beat Mexico at like two in the morning on anchor watch. That was great fun.”
“The bit I’ll remember the most, probably exploring Alderney which is genuinely really beautiful. Something I hadn’t experienced before.”
“I think the best bit for me was crossing the Channel and going through the fog. Then we came out the other side and we saw dolphins and the seal. I thought that was really good … I think the most memorable bit was probably the night sailing. It’s not something I’ve done before.”
Big thanks to sea staff James Boyce, Josh, Sara, Andy Kitching, Linnéa Johansson, Niamh Lamin and Sarah Kenwright.
That was followed by the return of New Beacon school – always one of our youngest client groups (boys aged 11-13) but as ever undertaking a relatively ambitious trip and covering some distance!
They joined a little bit late on Saturday after the heatwave caused chaos on the roads. After completing the initial safety briefings they set sail for a long passage from Poole to Plymouth Sound – a really big overnight passage straight away for our young crew! They did winch drills under way and then hoisted the main and staysail.
Night watches continued through the night and from 5-8am they were accompanied by dolphins and saw a beautiful sunrise.
They arrived in Plymouth around lunch time on Sunday and had some down time. Dinner was a curry and they had the first experience of some extreme washing up. First mate Patrick read a bedtime story.
Next day they completed some repairs on the staysail hanks and ORC soft hanks and then went for a sail to Wembury Bay under ORC and mizzen. Then they did some work towards their RYA qualifications and then held a law court session to debate the validity of a boat murder (in the game!). Dinner was a Pad Thai which went down a treat with all bowls being pretty much licked clean! The young people then heard more Dr Seuss to send them to sleep.
On Tuesday they went to Fowey, hoisting the main, mizzen and ORC – and then swapped the ORC for the jib, which gave the young people the opportunity to work out on the bowsprit. and the crew were able to explore the area that evening and then also the next morning too.
One of our regular relief skippers, Andy Brown, has been skippering another sail training vessel, Johanna Lucretia, this week and the two boats had spent time together in Plymouth and Fowey. Andy came on board Prolific on Wednesday morning for a cup of tea before we set off.
They completed some mizzen repairs to the battens underway and had fajitas just before arriving in Salcombe in time for the young people to watch the second half of the football.
Yesterday they did more RYA theory – working on Start Yachting qualifications for most of the crew, but three of the boys are hoping for the more advanced Competent Crew. In the afternoon they went to explore Salcombe and enjoy the beach and ice cream, and a beach BBQ was planned for the evening. Today they are heading to Brixham where the voyage ends tomorrow and we’ll put their feedback in the next issue.
Big thanks to sea staff Constantinos, Josh, Patrick Kelly, Keri Hammond, Pavan Kumar, Theo McKay, and Calum Clarke who works for OYT Scotland and came to see what life is like on board Prolific and in the sunny south!
* 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.
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.
Individual bookings for summer 2026
The 2026 programme is on the website and there is an availability list here.
There are just TWO voyages left this summer which may have spaces, especially if not all provisional bookings are confirmed – please spread the word and let’s fill the last few places!
12-16 August, Brixham to Brixham, 4 nights, age 11-16, passports not needed, £540 per person
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.
Adult voyages
There’s one more adult weekend this season:
9-11 Oct 2026, Southampton, 2 nights, age range 18+, £270 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.
2026 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
Huge thanks this week to all the people who are so kindly donating in memory of our friend and Chair of Trustees, Penny Scott-Bayfield.
Thank you also to the Royal Thames Yacht Club Charity for a generous donation towards bursaries for our Alfreton Park crew, and special thanks this month for all the small donations and especially those which come in regularly. In the last quarter we have received almost £3,400 from donations of between £100 and £500, and almost £2,500 from donations under £100. It really does all add up!
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 but an appropriate song for our sailing community would be this one which they did with the RNLI (and eagle-eyed viewers might spot our new Vice Patron and former RNLI CEO Mark Dowie in the background).
Raise funds for OYT South if you’re shopping online – we’ve made over £2,900 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 £2,900 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.