Page 16 - Salcombe Masthead 2020

14 Fleet Reports
THE ISLAND TRUST REPORT
The Island Trust was formed 40 years ago to give children access to the Island Cruising Club’s sailing boats and tuition. Over the years the Trust has grown and developed – at one stage it owned Provident – and it now runs a fleet of three traditional wooden sailing vessels based in Plymouth. Over the summer holidays a group of SYC Cadets made a week long voyage on the Trust’s new flagship, the 96ft topsail schooner Johanna Lucretia and met a royal visitor at the end of their trip.
makes the dream work’ and sure enough it was soon up and ready to go.
After around 4 hours of sailing we arrived in a bay just by Torpoint where we anchored off. The bay was stunning and the water was as flat as a pancake! We then had to cook dinner. To be brutally honest, no one jumped at the idea but the doubts we had were ridiculous because the food was incredible. We did all our jobs in watches which split the group in two. When one group was cooking the other group was on deck helping or resting and if you cooked the other watch washed up. That night we had delicious fajitas and after an unforgettable first day we were all tired so we bundled into our cabins and slept like logs.
At around 7:30am the next morning we were woken by music through the speakers and let me tell you from a first-hand experience this is one of the best ways to be woken up. After breakfast we began
our first cleaning session (we did this every mourning). The clean consisted of an upper deck scrub and wash and below deck we cleaned the heads, (the toilets) washed
up and sometimes swept the floor. That day a thick fog had fallen so unfortunately, we could not sail until about 3pm. We
took the dinghy onto the nearby shore
Isla McColl takes up the story:
Imagine a 90 foot, 2-masted wooden
pirate ship prepped to explore Europe’s coastline. Then, imagine 11 dingy sailors buzzing with excitement to travel over 100 miles across the wide ocean alongside 3 experienced sailors. Put these all together and you can almost picture the crew for Johanna Lucretia over the next week.
The trip began with all 11 of us embarking onto the ship with our huge packs strapped tightly to our backs. We excitedly explored the wooden decks
and after that we had a peep into the surprisingly spacious cabins. After a quick tour of our home for the week, we all gathered on the top deck and had an introduction to the adult crew. However, all of us youngsters knew each other from
school so there was no real need to talk about ourselves for too long! After a brief introduction to everyone we had a safety talk and then a general chit chat of what we wanted to achieve by the end of the week.
After discovering what was in hold for us, we truly couldn’t wait to get going. Our wishes were soon granted. We were off!
As the Plymouth Hoe began to drift into the distance a sense of independence rushed over us. It’s a feeling that very
few young people experience so early on in their life and I can tell you that it’s an amazing feeling. After a couple of hours finding our sea legs, we were instructed on how to put the main sail up. This is
far from a one-person job and it took the whole team working alongside each other to succeed. And, as they say ‘team work