In this Bulletin
Sections which have changed since last time marked *
- * Penny Scott-Bayfield
- * Voyage news
- * Volunteer sea staff bookings – PLEASE help!
- Funding for sail training staff / volunteer qualifications
- Sea Staff awards – nominations welcome
- Individual bookings for summer 2026
- Adult voyages
- 2026 dates for your diary – including maintenance day tomorrow
- Vessel tracking
- * 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!
- Chris Ellis Award – win £££s of the price of your next voyage
- New readers’ welcome and introduction
- Receiving this newsletter by email
* Penny Scott-Bayfield
The very saddest of news this week as we have to announce the death of Penny Scott-Bayfield, Chair of OYT South’s Board of Trustees, following a short illness. She was fifty-three years old and had been a Trustee since 2022 and our Chair since 2023, but her connection with the charity went back much further: she had sailed on board Prolific as mentor to a crew of girls in 2018; and her extensive network of friends included so many people who were involved in the charity in different ways.
Penny had a shining professional career but had retired as CFO of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc earlier this year and was looking forward to doing more of the things that she loved, including spending time with us at Ocean Youth Trust South. Until the start of May this year she was sailing as a watchleader on board Prolific and working towards qualifying as a third mate.
Penny was that rare combination of an acute business mind with the warmest and most empathetic of souls. She steered the Board expertly, took the tough decisions when needed and ensured that all of OYT South’s activities rested on the firmest foundations of sound finances and good governance. She was so passionate about making a lasting difference to the lives of the young people who sail with us; but above all else she understood that everything we achieve grows from the efforts of human beings, our staff and volunteers: her first care and priority was always for the people in the charity. She didn’t just go the extra mile to support individuals and make sure they felt valued and appreciated: she would have vaulted mountains for us.
If she ever heard that someone was struggling, there would be something – a message, a call, a present of books – from Penny. But there was so much more than sympathy and gestures: Penny would think deeply about ways to make a genuine difference, not merely tackling the surface issues but trying to give people the tools to take control of a situation and move forward. When Penny believed in someone, she was irresistible: whatever self-belief you could muster was galvanised and amplified by Penny’s faith in you. She wasn’t leading from the front: she was walking right beside us.
Penny adored Ocean Youth Trust South and was very deeply loved by all those of us who were lucky enough to know her. She joined in everything from events to vessel refits not merely because she knew that jobs needed doing but because she drew strength from the atmosphere and camaraderie on board Prolific. She might be involved in the most complex and demanding project at Bloomsbury but in the middle of it all she would turn up to a refit weekend and put in hours of hard physical graft, insisting that it worked like an injection of fresh energy and she would be going back to the office buoyed up by having spent a weekend with us. She would feed off the vitality and enthusiasm around her – and wave away any notion that she herself had been the greatest source of inspiration in the room.
Even when she was ill she always wanted to hear about OYT South and took huge pleasure in any tales from the boat. She loved the truly heartwarming feedback, when a young person or a parent or a teacher told us that something special or life-changing had happened on board. But she also loved the fun and irreverence that lies at the heart of sail training. It was never difficult to make Penny laugh.
We are heartbroken for her family, especially her husband Edd.
Penny was bright, beautiful and brilliant, and the truest, warmest and most caring friend anyone could ever want. Just for the moment it’s not very easy to face up to everything we must now do without her, but we know we will, because she was always so very proud of us. There will be great times yet to come for Ocean Youth Trust South, and a little bit of Penny’s spirit will always sail with us. Penny, we love you, we miss you and we will never forget you.
There will be a private family funeral, to be followed by a larger memorial event in the autumn. We will share details with Penny’s OYT South friends in due course.
This video tribute to Penny is set to music by Police Dog Hogan, the band in which the fiddle is played by Penny’s fellow OYT South trustee Eddie Bishop, who co-wrote this song: One Last Trip Around the Sun.
OYT South Board of Trustees
We are very grateful that our Vice Chair, Lesley Robinson, is available and willing to take over as Chair, and a previous Chair, Richard Griffiths, has taken over the Vice Chair role on a temporary basis.
* Voyage news
Last week we did a few day sails – on Thursday a corporate day for Sell Beyond, a company run by one of our former volunteers, and on Friday for Navigate Response, a company specialising in maritime crisis communications which has done some superb training for us. Of course a great deal of the charity’s efforts go into avoiding any crisis but it’s helpful to know that we have learned some of the skills that could be required, and even more that Navigate Response are friends who could advise us if needed.
Saturday and Sunday were more conventional day sails, with places taken by sponsors, donors, new potential clients and others who have supported us in various ways over the years or who might like to get involved, as well as some friends and family of our staff. We were able to thank people who had helped us and build some links which could very well lead to voyage bookings next year; and we also had one of our new Vice Patrons, Jamie Campbell, on board on Sunday – it was lovely to be able to spend some time with him.
We had some wonderful feedback on each day:
“Fabulous OYT team and great crew! Thanks for a wonderful day.”
“Fantastic day on the water & a lovely bunch of people to spend the day with. Best of luck for the future.”
“Super day, really looked after from start to finish. Thank you. Wonderful experience!”
“What a lovely day – great company and lovely to get out on the water again!”
“Thank you for the most fantastic day aboard. We have had the best time seeing ‘the other side’ of maritime. From those on the office side of maritime, it was great to see some fantastic seafarers in action.”
“Great experience and learning. Great to meet new people and hear their story. OYT South is impacting very positively. Great food too!”
“Wonderful to see the amazing work that the charity does. and very grateful for a day experiencing it, thank you and well done.”
“Thank you so much for a fantastic day, great to meet everyone and learn more about OYT South operations.”
“First Class from beginning to end. Very professional but also great fun. Fab lunch.”
“Amazing experience, amazing people, superb father and daughter memorable day – thank you so much for the invite, opportunity and experience.”
“What an amazing experience! All of the staff + volunteers are exceptional human beings! The support and experience you provide to young people is invaluable and will stay with them for years! Amazing work!!”
“This was a great experience doing something new. The crew were amazing! I can’t wait to get our young people on board this boat – it will blow their minds :)”
“A fab day on the water. Loved being able to get so involved. Thank you! :)”
“Wonderful to meet Prolific, finally! Thank you and see you very soon x”
“A totally different Sunday! Thank you for a brilliantly rewarding experience.”
“Amazing experience, amazing staff, amazing guests, amazing food! AMAZING!!!”
“Amazing experience! Very welcoming and I have learnt so much today! Thank you all!”
One of Sunday’s guests was Shane Wheeler-Osman, who as Bucket List Boy has had more than 3.8 million online views of his video content exploring grief, community and childhood joy. Do have a look at Bucket List Boy on Instagram or TikTok but in the meantime, enjoy the wonderful video he made of his day in the water with us and the lovely things he said about Ocean Youth Trust South.
For all these day sails, big thanks to sea staff Constantinos, Mark, Sara, Andy Viney, Miranda Camping, Tom Knight, Adam Lane, Cathy Ayres, Dom Coleman, Val Hague, Annant Shah, Juno Hollyhock, Iori Kent, Elena Piras, Caz and special congratulations to Matts Kruger who completed his third mate assessment!
This week we have been sailing with Harris Merton School. Ten boys and two teachers joined on Monday, keen for adventure so they left Ocean Village as soon as the welcome and safety briefings were done.
They motored straight to Johnny Caulcutt’s buoy off Yarmouth – ready for the outgoing tide to take them west the next morning to Weymouth. A great spell of sailing and glorious sunshine on the way, giving the boys a taste of the joys of sailing Prolific. Lumpy seas meant some seasickness but everyone pushed on through.
On Wednesday morning the beach and swimming cooled everyone down and they headed back east to Totland Bay on the Isle of Wight. Eager to earn a qualification, everyone got stuck into the RYA Start Yachting syllabus, with a man overboard recovery demonstration and fire drill completed en route, as well as another spell of sailing before the wind dropped away.
It was a stunning evening, enjoying a beach BBQ and watching the sun set behind Prolific.
Early to rise yesterday as they needed to get fuel in Cowes, and with a stiff easterly, they had the ideal opportunity to experience tacking, at pace! Waving to another sail training vessel, Queen Galadriel (looking splendid) on the way.
Yesterday afternoon they went for ice-cream in Cowes and the voyage ends today. We’ll put all the feedback in the next issue, but meanwhile thank you to the sea staff Constantinos, Adam Lane, Glyn Collins, Unity Bowns, Rose MacInnes, Matts Kruger and Izzy Reimann.
* Volunteer sea staff bookings – PLEASE help!
Please do get in touch if you can help with any of these!
31 Aug – 4 Sept, Poole to Southampton – qualified watchleader needed
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.
2026 dates for your diary – including maintenance day tomorrow
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:
THIS Saturday 27th June – Southampton
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
Big thanks this week to Samson Materials Handling for another very generous donation.
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. 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 £2,800 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.