SLYC member Tim Jeffery has shared his experiences of sailing around Britain with Pudsey for BBC Children in Need!
£70,000 was the objective and within 24 hours of ending our 2,250-mile sail round Britian & Northern Ireland we’d passed the target. In fact it was closer to £80,000. Thank-you HMRC! Gift Aid made the telling contribution.
By the time we’d got back to the River Hamble (near Southampton), we’d visited 37 places and held 79 Pudsey Events. Pudsey Bear of course was our most famous and recognisable crew member. He was a smile-generator wherever he went. Young kids hugged him for comfort, older ones High/Low Fived, people of all ages wanted selfies and one 102-year-old lady in a nursing home wanted to marry him. Only early teen boys couldn’t decide if being seen with Pudsey was cool or uncool, so held back.
The fact that Pudsey was onboard was an act of remarkable trust by BBC Children in Need. No other group of external, voluntary fundraisers had been given Pudsey for longer than a one-off fundraising event. We took him sailing for three months and still have him. We’re carrying on with land-based events throughout autumn and winter, re-calibrating our £70k target to something higher.
Taking Pudsey sailing was the brilliance in the pitch by skipper Jonathan Brewin to the BBC. He’d watched Radio 2 star Sarah Cox’s refusal to fail in her quest to run the equivalent of five marathons in five days for 2025’s BBC Children in Need traditional November broadcast and decided there and then, in front his TV and on the settee, to do something meaningful himself.
The next day he’d written to BBC Children in Need. The reply came back almost as fast. In 40 years, the charity sensed that this was something different. Pudsey sailing for the first time? Tick. A long-term fundraising effort that visited all four countries of the UK where BBC Children in Need makes grants? Tick. A chance to meet some of those who’ve received support in the past? Tick. And a real opportunity to engage in multiple conversations about BBC Children in Need’s core 2026 campaign – the ballooning crisis in mental health- well, that was the biggest tick of all.
I am not alone in saying that this has been the most affecting part of the entire voyage. Jonathan and I marked our 70thbirthdays during the circumnavigation. We’d done a lot of offshore racing together in our Twenties. After families and careers took us away, we’d re-connected in recent years. Our generation has little understanding of issues in young persons’ mental health but our eyes have been opened and we’ve listened, read and learned.
Without question, the most impactful part of the voyage for me was a visit to a mental-health walk-in and support centre in Peterhead, Scotland. Ostensibly for adults, Men United has helped lads as young as eight. Listening to the group members talk, often with difficulty, about how issues in everyday life were weighing down on them, almost unbearably, was discomforting yet uplifting. Why so? Because after our Big Bear Voyage presentation several of those who bared their own very raw thoughts minutes before came- up and said: “Thank-you for talking about mental health. Thank-you.”
This echoed precisely with something we were told by front-line children care workers at the Pirates Party Pudsey had joined in at the Royal Northern & Clyde YC in Rhu. “It is a hidden problem. We need to get it out into the open more.”
If I’ve not talked about the sailing much, that’s because it played a tiny part of the three- month Big Bear Voyage. The administration and shore activities was easily 100 times more time-consuming. Far exceeding our initial expectations, we grew the shore team throughout to try and stay on top of it all. We rotated 33 persons through Big Bear’s crew but the total team was 50 persons. That’s a measure of how a simple sail round our coasts grew into a major endeavour.
Big Bear herself is a J/160, a fast passage maker with long legs and an easy motion. We built in two days a week into the schedule for weather disruptions but we were never held-up. We did miss out the Isle of Man (it would have been fun to see how the TT fans greeted Pudsey had we visited Peel’s Creek Inn) to get ahead of a strong south-westerly system coming up the Irish Sea but the only really hard passage was in the closing stages, a long day crashing into a head wind-against-tide Channel tide on the Ramsgate-Brighton leg.
Yes, we wore full oilskins and several layers a lot in the north and Stornoway Coastguard seemed to mention rain or showers in every forecast, but it wasn’t hard sailing. The string of early tide-necessary early starts made for a lot deep-seated tiredness but the reward was the variety of coastal scenery from the grandeur of the top of Scotland to the fascination the wind farm industry which had something going on seemingly everywhere.
Highlights? A stunning beat up the Sound of Mull; reaching past Cape Wrath with a proper Atlantic swell; being made so welcome on The Royal Yacht Britannia (skipper Jonathan Brewin used to be mast man for eight Cowes Weeks with the late Duke of Edinburgh steering Yeoman XXX1V); and having Pudsey take us under Tower Bridge.
Pudsey signed the Visitor’s Book in Stormont too. The disturbances in Belfast in early June saw all of our planned activities bar one cancelled at the last moment yet in a remarkable act of support given that she was flat-out with her parliamentarian responsibilities, Kate Nicholl MLA arranged for us to visit the Northern Ireland Assembly and meet Deputy Speaker John Blair MLA.
Kate’s willingness to take the trouble when she was flat-out being a voice of calm and reason in the turmoil was one of countless acts of kindness we encountered. We can’t really forget our arrival into Wick, a quiet former fishing port in north-east Scotland. As we tidied-up our lines we noticed that on the other side of pontoon someone had fully-fendered the long and short sides of it. Right on cue, George Durrandarrived in his Beneteau and moored by leaving some starboard helm on and the throttle in forward. “No thanks!” he said we offered to help. He stepped off, arranged his dock lines, got back on board and shut his engine down.
Widowed, George has devoted his time sailing and doing good things. Hearing what the Big Bear Voyage was about, George made a donation on the spot and vowed to return in the afternoon. He did, having visited all his mates and singlehandedly raised £300 for BBC Children in Need.
Our Big Bear Voyage will continue by switching to land-based Pudsey events. Please read the BBC Children in Need link. Being a trusted listener and supportive friend is something we can all do. The Big Bear Voyage story has been told through our Facebook posts (500k views!) and we want to see the JustGiving total rise through continuing donations.
Thank-you,
Tim
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