Endeavour has now been covered up for the winter. This year we decided to leave her in the water at Leigh Marina, as she'd been
out of the water enough over the past year! She's got a lovely sheltered berth.
Her mast has been lowered and a wooden framework erected on the deck. A canvas covering was then installed, and even in the November cold, the heat inside the 'tent' was quite exceptional, and of course social distancing made everything that little bit harder than it should have been.
Endeavour’s former owner, Peter Wexham had a leading part in the protest with his partner, Dave Spurgeon. Recalling the protest Peter said: “It was always hard to make a living whilst having a family and a mortgage as well as the expenses of the boat and this was a very hard decision in my life.
As we are unable to have our normal AGM this year, we thought you would appreciate an update on our financials. The detailed financial status is now available, as usual, on the website – look under AGM.
2019/20 has been a particularly costly year for the trust. Luckily we were able to hold our dinner in November, but as you are all aware, all other fund raising events have been cancelled due to the pandemic.
We have lovely members in the trust, which we are so thankful for, some of whom have helped even further by making some lovely donation, totalling over £2k in the year.
One sponsor, The East Anglia Pub company (The Peter Boat), also donated a sum of £580, and we have been informed that we will be receiving a donation of £333 from the Waitrose Community Matters programme.
You may have seen that we have also now got a donation button working on our Facebook and website, so donating couldn’t be easier – and it’s such fun to use too – plus we have Amazon Smile now available for anybody who buys online.
Main financial note this year has been the removal of rot from the boat. As you would have read in the last newsletters, as part of our usual maintenance schedule, we had planned in this year to get the deck re-caulked by Brian Kennell and Shaun White, the boat builders who performed the original restoration.
We took the boat round to their yard in St Osyth, but when they started investigative work, they found a significant amount of rot in the stern deck, rudder and transom, which meant that Endeavour was laid up over there for much longer than we had originally envisaged.
The final repair bill for 2019/20 was over £16k, over half of which was covered by the wonderful Co-op donation that we had received in early 2019, and we are so thankful to the people of Leigh-on-Sea and the Coop community fund for making that happen.
We took advantage, whilst Endeavour was laid up over in St Osyth for months, and a bunch of ‘willing volunteers’ spent some very, very cold and some very, very hot days over in St Osyth, and in Leigh Marina, scraping, sanding and painting her… an experience we won’t forget!! She is now looking lovely.
The Trust started the year with a total of £19,172.50 in the bank, and we ended the financial year at the end of August with £6,978.53. Hopefully, normality can ensue in 2020/21 and we can plan some events together...
Thank you members!!
Rob Everitt—Treasurer
Amazon Smile is a charitable donations programme run by Amazon. For every eligible purchase on the platform, Amazon will make a donation of 0.5% of the net cost of the product (excluding VAT, returns and shipping fees) to the charity of your choice free-of-charge to you, and we are pleased to say that the Leigh-on-Sea Endeavour Trust is one you can choose to donate to if you are a resident of the UK.
All you have to do is use a dedicated link when you use Amazon; smile.amazon.co.uk. The first time you do this, after you log in, you will be asked to select your charity and there after, as long as you use that dedicated Amazon Smile link, we will get the donation from eligible purchases.
A few shots from the weekend of Endeavour's trip down to St Katherine's Dock where she was due to rendezvous with other Association of Dunkirk Little Ships craft. We were thrilled to have been joined by so many members for the journey and they all reported enjoying it very much indeed.
