In this Bulletin
Sections which have changed since last time marked *
- * Maintenance day NEXT Monday 1st June
- * Volunteer sea staff bookings – PLEASE help! Some of these gaps MUST be filled a.s.a.p.
- Volunteers’ Week
- * Voyage news
- Funding for sail training staff / volunteer qualifications
- Sea Staff awards – nominations welcome
- Individual bookings for summer 2026
- Adult voyages
- 2026 dates for your diary
- 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
* Maintenance day NEXT Monday 1st June
We have a planned maintenance day in Ocean Village, Southampton, next Monday 1st June – do please come and help if you can! Lots of skilled and unskilled jobs to do, including a chance to learn about boat maintenance and how Prolific works. Email refit@oytsouth.org or call the boat phone 07990 518915 if you want to come along.
* Volunteer sea staff bookings – PLEASE help! Some of these gaps MUST be filled a.s.a.p.
Please do get in touch if you can help with any of these! Some of these dates are reappearing on the list because no sooner do we replace someone who has dropped out, than someone else drops out!
8-12 June, Southampton – qualified or trainee mate URGENTLY needed
13-17 June, Southampton– space for a trainee mate
11-18 July, Poole to Brixham – qualified or trainee watchleader or bosun URGENTLY needed.
31 Aug – 4 Sept, Poole to Southampton – qualified watchleader needed
26-29 Sept, Southampton – qualified watchleader or bosun needed
5-9 Oct, Southampton –qualified watchleader ideally needed, but possibly also space for a trainee watchleader
19-23 Oct, Southampton – qualified watchleader, and possibly space for a trainee watchleader as well
28 Oct – 1 Nov, Southampton – qualified watchleader
2 Nov – qualified watchleaders for day sail
Please send offers or questions to webmaster1@oytsouth.org.
Volunteers’ Week
Volunteers’ Week runs from 1st to 7th June and while we are hugely grateful all year round to our volunteers, this is a week when we really want to showcase and highlight volunteers and tell everyone how much they mean to us. If you want to be involved, can you complete the sentence “I like volunteering with Ocean Youth Trust South because ….”, either in writing or in a video, and send it to the office? The easiest option for a video may be to send via WhatsApp, if you are a member of the OYT South Community WhatsApp. Written contributions can be emailed to office@oytsouth.org, and you can include a photo, or we can use one we already have of you!
* Voyage news
The last newsletter was written as students from Applemore College were just completing their voyage. Their feedback included:
“It was really fun and made new friends and learnt new skills … thank you for all the amazing experience through the week.”
“I had such a great time on the boat, the crew were so kind and respectful and funny. The vibes were really good. I would definitely do it again. Most lasting memory: steering the boat, that was fun!”
“It was fun and I learned new stuff and had a good time.”
“I am talking to more people and I am confident I could do it again.”
“It was fun and a great experience.”
“Being here is the best part. The worst bit is being about to leave.”
“Best bit: when we were tipping a lot. Worst bit: when I felt a bit seasick. But I wasn’t sick so it was ok. Most lasting memory: being able to do the daily checks on the engine.”
The bank holiday weekend was spent with students from Barton Peveril Sixth Form College. The crew joined at 8pm on Friday and did introductions and safety briefings as well as looking at the chart for a discussion about where they might go:
The forecast was for little wind on the Saturday and Sunday but potentially good sailing conditions on Monday. After discussing what was possible, the crew chose a trip across the Channel, starting with a crossing at night! They set off around midnight and hoisted the mizzen in Southampton Water and the mainsail in the Western Solent. They passed through the Needles around 0330 and set a course for Alderney.
There was little to no wind for the whole crossing and so they were under motor and spotted land around 9am. They dropped sails and picked up a mooring buoy, had some lunch and then went ashore for beach time and exploring Alderney.
Cold showers weren’t the best part of the day, but it didn’t matter! Back on the boat they had dinner, wash up, another planning session with the chart, games and bed.
Next day they were up at 6am, hoisted sails and motored out of the harbour:
A strong tide took them towards Guernsey and the Little Russell channel and then they did a man overboard recovery exercise and dropped sails:
They tied up in Guernsey, cleaned the boat and had lunch before going ashore for (warm) showers and time to explore the streets of Saint Peter Port. Once back on board they prepared dinner, learned some sailing theory, discussed the next day’s passage and went to bed as they had another early start.
Next day began at 4am. In near silence they slipped lines and left St Peter Port, hoisting sails at dawn:
The wind filled in nicely and soon they were sailing at 7 knots and occasionally 9 knots under main, mizzen, staysail and jib:
During the passage they did more learning of knots and pilotage and buoyage theory as well as taking the chance to go out on the bowsprit:
The three watches also made plans for the young people to be in charge of the pilotage in the Solent. They arrived off the Needles by early evening and spent a brief period on a buoy outside Yarmouth, where a yacht called Bucephalus was anchored nearby and kindly took some photos which they shared with us:
They set off for Ocean Village after dinner and the young people did a great job with the navigation exercise:
They finally tied up at 0015 on Tuesday morning. Not exhausted enough, the crew insisted they finish some games and then went to bed for a lie in (!) until a 7am start to clean the boat and finish the voyage with games, certificates and chats.
They had completed 214 miles at sea and you can see their full voyage track here.
Feedback included:
“I absolutely loved the whole trip, the people, the sailing, and the Channel Islands. I will never forget it as long as I live.”
“Prolific was an amazing experience, I never expected a Channel crossing which was great to see the islands. Thank you!”
“It was a lovely experience and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute learning new things, even through the sea sickness. Most lasting memory: the navigation at the end, and just getting stuck in.”
“I loved every second of this trip and it was all done with great care. I’m very happy to return.”
“I had an amazing time exploring the Channel Islands and sailing with people that I didn’t know before.”
“I had the best time, I loved everyone that I met. I really enjoyed sailing and all the games.”
“I absolutely loved everyone and meeting all the new people and working closely with each other was amazing, and getting close to people that I didn’t think I’d be close to.”
“I came to explore, oh boy did I. Would do it all again.”
“Had the most indescribable time with an amazing group. Made it all the way across the Channel to Guernsey which I was not expecting. Lovely stuff.”
“The trip was an amazing experience and I loved every second of it. I met so many great people and had a lot of fun. Thank you.”
“I loved meeting such an amazing group of new people. I have learnt so many new different skills and could not stop laughing.”
And from the staff member who came with them:
“Absolutely fantastic crew – Andy, Andrew, Reya, Juno, Josh, Miranda, Pavan – so patient, kind and encouraging. Excellent at throwing plates across the tables. Great vibes – well done all. Best bit: Getting the feedback from the staff about the students being awesome. And the sunrise and sunset. Most lasting memory: The dolphins, and taking the helm.”
Big thanks to sea staff Andy Viney, Josh, Miranda Camping, Anna Owen, Andrew Page, Reya Batchelor and special congratulations to Pavan Kumar and Juno Hollyhock who both passed third mate assessments!
This week we are sailing with students from Beaulieu Park School, Essex. They joined on Wednesday and after the usual briefings, set off for Johnny Caulcutt’s buoy outside Yarmouth.
It was a lovely night with spectacular lightning in the small hours.
Yesterday they headed out via the North Channel with the young people learning to navigate using back bearings. The sails went up and they headed west, with did a man overboard recovery demonstration on the way.
By early evening they were secured in Portland, where they enjoyed a sunset walk to the beach. More on their voyage in the next issues, but big thanks to sea staff Lee Mosscrop, Sara, Josh, Rob Lawrence, Si Brammer, Tori Pickles and Terry Patterson.
Funding for sail training staff / volunteer qualifications
Are you a watchleader or bosun with us and committed to long-term involvement in sail training, already qualified to at least Day Skipper level, and looking to gain more qualifications in order to make progress? The Trinity House ASTO Bursaries Scheme could help you afford some courses, but under a new system starting this year, the application window is 1 April – 30 June each year, with no other rounds, and applicants MUST be endorsed by an ASTO member such as OYT South. If you are thinking of applying in this year’s window or simply want to know more about how it works, please contact us!
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 have spaces – 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, age 11-25, £540 per person
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
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:
Monday 1st June – Southampton
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 the TK Foundation, Stephen Evatt and everyone donating in memory of Brian Eyres.
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.