Written by Sam:

I was the first to arrive at the office to meet the minibus, even before Rachel arrived with the bus, because my sister was having a driving lesson with my dad. We loaded up the minibus, collected wellies and were just about to leave when Dylan realised, he didn’t have batteries for his hearing aid, so a quick call home and his dad was on route with them and the boots he had also forgotten. Thirty minutes later we were finally on route to Portsmouth, l liked the bus ride, some of us slept, but we mostly looked out the windows. We found lots of traffic so arrived half an hour later than planned but were met with trolleys by Riley and James. The trolleys were hard to manoeuvre, and we did drop a few things (l did make an epic pillow save) but they were sooooooooo much better than carrying all our stuff ourselves.

Once aboard Challenger 3 we had a refresher of all the boat parts and how to do things. We were surprised with how much we had all remembered from our previous voyages. We were then told that the first leg on our voyage to Ipswich was to sail overnight going with the tide to Dover and arrive tomorrow morning, l felt we had was pretty good chance of achieving this and l was excited for the challenge.

We then met Peter, Pippa and Lisa from the Cape Horner’s society, they have all been on voyages around the world and some of them have been involved in races on the old challenger boats. They gave us all free baseball hats and l really like mine, but now l am still enjoying my camouflage fleece lined Ushanka/bomber hat. I am sure you’ll see it a lot in the photos Rachel keeps taking.

Once we had slipped the lines in Portsmouth and headed out to the east coast of the Isle of Wight, we put up the main sail, it was hard work but really rewarding when we got it all the way to the top. I worked with Alessa, and we really had to work together to pull it back and down so Summer in the snake pit could pull in on the winch. Then we put up the staysail, l improved my technique on the second time of sweating the sails. I was then the first young person to drive the boat, it was amazing and at one point l was steering with one hand and had a coffee in the other with the sun out. The first quote of the voyage was me saying “Rate my driving on uber” while drinking my cup of coffee.

Port watched cooked dinner (my team) but l was busy on deck, so they prepared chicken fajitas without me. They were banging and we had enough for two each.

At 7pm we started our overnight watch system, Starboard were on deck until 11pm, they had a nice time till about 10pm when it started raining. When we got on deck at 11pm it was still raining and it continued until 3am. During this time, we took the staysail and Yankee down because there was no need for them.

Written by Will:

Starboard watch were supposed to take over from Port watch at 3am but they struggled to get up so it was nearly quarter past by the time they got up on deck to relieve them.

During their time on deck in the dark they manged to keep themselves entertained throughout their 4 hour watch by having hourly sweet breaks (first one at 4am was Cadbury Wispa. Then at 5am it Haribo Twin Snakes and they tried to have Haribo Sour Sparks at 6am). They also played an abundance of games, to varying degrees of success. Eye Spy in the dark was probably not a sensible idea, but they made it happen, though enunciation was poor as was their knowledge of the phonetic alphabet. Their last sweet break was interrupted with them putting up the staysail and as l was awake l came up on deck early to be plunged straight into sweating the Yankee sail up which thoroughly woke me up.

We had watched the sunrise over the coast and go straight into a cloud. Then disaster struck about 10 minutes before we were due to arrive into Dover. THE MAIN SAIL RIPPED!!! So this will be a very expensive problem to fix. So we quickly dropped it as soon as we could.

After manoeuvring around and floating around in the outer harbour we eventually made it through into the inner harbour and moored ourselves up starboard side too. Before indulging ourselves in a warm pancake fuelled brunch kindly prepared by Rachel we had to sort the boat out, so we flaked the main away ready to use reef two tomorrow and placed the boom cover over it, then bagged and rolled the staysail and Yankee so they will be ready to be used tomorrow!

We were then surprised! With hoodies! Displaying the logos of both Tall Ships Youth Trust and Youth Action Wiltshire, which were very snazzy!

It was time we celebrated and showed of our brand spanking new hoodies, so we took them out on an afternoon in the town doing some shopping! Our purchases included spam and spoons bought by Sam, a large stuffed toy bought by Lucas and l bought a Lego sailing boat.

In a charity shop, I was trying to decide on which handbag l should get and a lovely lady critiqued my choices and helped me pick out a flashy enough handbag. Alas I didn’t have it in me to make the purchase so I walked away flashy handbagless . ☹

Next was our most exciting venture yet BUILDING A BOAT! ON A BOAT! SURROUNDED BY BOATS! It is magnificent and is on display in pride of place in the saloon.

We cooked dinner of tomato pasta, which was lovely and simple and overseen by Riley, which in the words of Molly was BANGING!!!!!!!

After dinner we looked through a series of charts and plotted the logistics of tomorrows passage to Chatham dockyard. The group was distraught to find out we were HAVING TO GET UP AT SIX AM!!!!!!

But we finished the day with several games of uno flip, the winnings were shared between Lucas, Dylan and l.

Written by Lucas and Mollie

We had to get up very early this morning at 6am because we had to leave Dover at 7am so we would have enough time to get all the way round to Chatham for high tide at 5pm.

We threw some cereal in our faces very quickly so we had eaten before sorting the boat out for the day, we rotated round between eating, moving lines and sorting out sails.

We managed to leave at 6.50am, ten minutes ahead of time. Which l was just reminded about now, but others were very pleased.

Once in the outer harbour we put up the main sail, but as we had ripped it yesterday we could only put it up to reef 2. We then sailed past the white cliffs of Dover and put the spinnaker pole up so people could climb to the end of it, Riley went first as he nominated as the test guinea pig, all was well and he didn’t fall in. Then Sam went up and he climbed the whole way using just his arms. Then l went up, we didn’t time ourselves but l think l was slightly quicker than him. Finally Will got himself all harnessed up, but on stepping over the guard rails he managed to activate his life jacket and set off his PLB – his personal location beacon which sent a message out to the coastguard to say that someone had fallen overboard, but as he hadn’t James had to give them a ring and say it was a false alarm. Will felt that he was like a dangling helium balloon off the side of the boat until he was recovered.

After putting the pole away we put the front sails up, the yankee and the staysail. We sailed upwind with the coast on our port side and several wind farms on our starboard side.

Then we started to cook lunch, this was ok until we rounded the corner at Margate and the boat started to heal over and everything on the hob, tables and side flipped over and went everywhere. So cooking was abandoned for a bit. When the boat was healed over walking on the deck and down below was much harder, so we ended up walking on the walls to get to get anywhere.

Riley was left downstairs as a sacrificial lamb to oversee the cooking of lunch and retrieve the wayward food. Mollie did great work grating the cheese and it went well with the hot dogs and steak slices.

Throughout the afternoon we all did lots of helming, either steering a bearing or keeping a close-hauled course which was tricky at times. We did about 10 hours of sailing during the day.

Sailing down the Thames estuary we went past the wreck of the Richard Montgomery which was a munitions ship from the USA was carrying high EXPLOSIVES and was sunk by a German vessel boat in the 1940s and it’s all still there on the sea floor. If it was to explode it would take out all the windows in the houses in Southend-on-Sea.

On the river Medway we took the sails down and packed them away into their bags. Getting into the marina at Chatham was through a lock and this was a bit “fun” but we really had to work together to do it and both Ian and James made it look really easy so we didn’t hit any walls.

Dinner preparation had started over three hours earlier, but unfortunately a small proportion of the jacket potatoes were still raw. The chilli con carne preparation hit some roadblocks with everyone having different opinions about how to cook it all. It was at this point that Will decided to opt out of the argument about how to cook onions and came on deck to help sort the lines but kept falling over the pole so decided that he would give up with sailing and become a pole dancer!

We had a chilled out time this evening, getting showers, calming down and rekindling  friendships. Tomorrow we are very excited about having a lie in and a full English cooked breakfast.

Written by Mollie, Lucas and Will:

We managed to have a lie in until 8am so this meant that we could cook a full English breakfast. We had bacon, sausages, hash browns, beans, we decided that we didn’t want fried eggs as we couldn’t make scrambled as there wasn’t any milk, oops! The fry up turned into breakfast wraps after Mollie suggested it.

It was then happy hour, which on a boat means deep clean, all the surfaces were wiped down, swept the floors, recoiled all the lines in the snake pit and took Yankee 1 off and stowed it in the sail locker neat and tidy. Mollie cleaning the head did a like a tornado with the Dettol, everything was spotless when she finished.

We then planned the meals for the rest of the voyage, there were a lot of suggestions, and everyone was talking over each other so we ended up with a talking spoon so everything ran much smoother from then on out. We decided on a lot of carbohydrate loaded meals, but also wanted more fibre so added in some vegetables – broccoli was needed! We were then all challenged to guess how much the food we wanted to buy would cost. Costs ranged from £90 up to £186, the last was over our budget of £180 for all 12 of us for the next three days. After writing a list of all the items we needed we headed off to Iceland which was the nearest food shop, we divided into two groups to find all the items, but lots of things weren’t there. So after waiting for ages to pay we divided up and Summer, Mollie and Lucas took the first lot of food back to the boat and the rest of us went to the Co-op to get the rest. We got back to the boat with the remaining of the shopping and Rachel and Lucas cooked cheese toasties on the hob, Will came in to help at the end as we eat so many we had to grate more cheese, they were very tasty though!

We then set about blowing up the dinghy, first we had to winch it out the sail locker using the halliard we got it on the deck then used a foot pump to inflate it. It took us an hour to pump it up between the three of us (Dylan, Alessa and Mollie). After launching it from the deck we took it to the pontoon to get in. In pairs we rowed around the marina with Riley acting as the figure head. Summer and Alessa went first, the Will and Lucas (so confident they did donuts all the time – on purpose of course!), then Rachel and Mollie (who were the best, had the straightest line, worked as team and were the quickest back to the pontoon), followed by Sam and Dylan. No one fell in (unfortunately as that would have been very funny). Then we took it in turns to paddle with Riley.

We had decided on chicken nuggets and chips, the chicken to be done in the oven and the chips from the local fish and chip shop. We had forgotten some items from our initial shop, so took the 10 minute walk to the coop and chip shop which was actually really near our boat but unfortunately the marina entrance wasn’t. We left Sam in charge of the chicken which he did exceptionally well with, Mollie helped him when he got flustered. We forgot to cook our peas and sweetcorn but the feast was very good anyway.

After dinner James empowered us, as this is an empowerment voyage after all we needed more empowering, even though we are all really empowered already. During this Rachel made chocolate marshmallow rice crispy cakes but didn’t share with us. We are hoping she does tomorrow 😉

Before bed we had some last-minute showers as we are up early at 6am tomorrow to leave the lock. Rachel brought us a new game called Ok Go, which Riley and Dylan got very competitive over. Maybe we will return to playing Uno Flip.

Written by: Summer, Alessa and Rachel

Getting up this morning was very hard as it was another early one at 6am so we could get out the lock at high tide. These early mornings are getting harder as everyone is tired. First on deck was Lucas, shortly followed by Dylan ready to remove the sail bags and covers, sort lines and move fenders.

We slipped the lines at Chatham at 6.35am, only 5 mins later than planned. Headed into the lock and as we had less tide than when we entered we were worried we were going to hit the sill. But we had over 2 m of water below the keel. Huzzah!

As we motored up the river towards the Thames estuary Rachel cooked us breakfast all by herself. We had pancakes again, but this time no burnt ones.

As we got further down river we started to put the sails up, starting with the main then the Yankee 3, out in the estuary we did a lot of gybing as we were in a narrow channel and were downwind sailing so didn’t want to run aground on the mud at the sides. Once we got the staysail up we changed direction, which got us a better angle to the wind, which also got us more speed!

For lunch we had freshly baked baguettes, straight from the oven which were very tasty. Looking at tomorrows forecast, we swapped the Yankee 3 for the Yankee 2 sail, but James had us do it as if we were racing. So we hanked Yankee 2 while Yankee 3 was still up, then took down Yankee 3, put up then put up Yankee 2 immediately so we didn’t lose any speed. Manoeuvring between the wind farms, sandbanks, ship wrecks and container ships at anchor (we also tried to hide from the rain but failed at that one) we eventually arrived at Felixstowe container port and Harwich ferry port where we found a safe and sheltered anchorage up the river stour for the night. We learned lots of hand signals so we could direct James to lay the anchor correctly.

A “build your own” pasta dinner was very successful, even though John thought we hadn’t cooked enough. After a quick wash up and clean through (Rachel motivated us to do it really quickly) we had time for a few rounds of ok go, which Riley took great delight in explaining to everyone, again it got quite heated with multiple people colluding to stop people winning.

Written by: Lucas, Will, Sam and Rachel

We were all up at some point in the night as we were at anchor. So from midnight onwards we did anchor watches (as Ian did until midnight). Summer and Alessa did until 2am, Dylan, Sam and John from 2am to 4am, James did from 4am to 6am on his own (but didn’t fill in the log sheet!) and Will, Mollie and Lucas did from 6am to 8am. We had to use the hand held compass to take a bearing reading every 15 minutes and check that the battery voltage didn’t drop too low, otherwise we would have had to turn on the generator.

During Sam, Dylan and Johns stint they made it a maths lesson on averages by all taking a bearing independently and then working out the mean average, this was made much harder by the driving rain obscuring the lights on the tower.

Will, Mollie and Lucas’s watch was going well until the lights we were using were turned off, so we had to find a new landmark to take a bearing from to make sure we hadn’t dragged on the anchor.

Ian then gave a thorough lesson in passage planning and so we worked out a route going up the river and back between various buoys and we had to work out different bearing, speeds and distances.

Once on deck we were given control of the boat and told to get it ready for the day, the adults then were very annoying and acted like children, getting in the way, not doing what they were told, being very unhelpful, needing to go down below for a wee, get a drink and even running away (James!).  We now understand how annoying we can be.

But Will was amazing and managed to get us all in the right place to hoist the main and the Yankee, then we started our navigation up the river.

We smashed it (metaphorically) and managed the route without crashing into anything, we then headed out to see Sealand the principality which is an old ocean platform. This was when the weather picked up, with bigger waves and with the wind up to a force 7 at points. Once we got there (its 6 miles out to sea) we had to tack our way back and this was when we realised that downwind sailing was so much nicer than upwind sailing. Because this was when the challenger chunder chart was started (it ends with Lucas on 4, Dylan on 1 and Sam on 1). Over the next couple of hours, we put in lots of long tacks to make it back to the relative safety outside Felixstowe. But to get into we needed to do lots of short tacks up the channel, by this point Will was the only young person left on deck as everyone else was downstairs, either being ill or warming up from the cold. Riley and John worked hard on the starboard winch and Will and Rachel on the port one.

We motored up the river and went through the lock into the marina at Ipswich in the dark, mooring up on the pontoon for the last time ☹

After having burgers for dinner we all had some pretty banging showers and have got back just in time for bed.

Written by: Rachel (with help in between cleaning jobs by everyone)

Our final day started at 7am and everyone was a zombies when they surfaced from their bunks, but within about 10 minutes everyone was awake and around the table trying to eat some breakfast.

Then the cleaning jobs started, bilges were pumped, heads were bleached, bunks were swept, oilies were stowed, decks were scrubbed, floors were hoovered, galley was cleaned and a myriad of other jobs were also completed.

An important part of this empowerment voyage was looking back at what you had achieved, how it had made you feel, what challenges you had encountered and how they had over come them. So every day we have had a round table discussion but todays was longer and more in-depth.

They have all passed their Competent Crew qualifications, which is well deserved as they have all worked very hard. Unfortunately there weren’t enough certificates on the boat so they are being posted to them.

We have taken the obligatory group photos out on deck in out hoodies, t-shirts and baseball hats which will be making their way to Facebook at some point later today. Now we are about to depart the boat, with all of our bags, heading to the train station for our long journey back to Wiltshire. Thanks for the memories they have been epic!