“Bright Spark looks pretty in the pictures; it is absolutely beautiful to sail. Ghosting in no wind or storming along in force 4. What a brilliant week. Loved it (didn’t want to give her back).”

“Myself, wife, in-laws, and two dogs have just returned from a wonderful week aboard ‘Bright Spark’ - a wonderful traditional Norfolk Broads yacht which is owned and operated by Oliver’s Sailing Holidays. The week was all and more than we expected. Bright Spark is a wonderful sailing boat, and provided good accomodation for the 6 of us. She is well equipped, reliable and easy to use once familiar. I am realatively new to sailing, with dinghy experience, so opted for additional training from Olivier’s Sailing in addition to the familiarisation normally provided. This was provided by Liz and Nick over two days (we ran out of time on the first day, with flexibility being shown by Nick to follow up on a second day). It was both useful and fun. I quickly gained confidence and picked up a few tips. Oliver’s Sailing Holidays are based at Martham Ferry boatyard, making Horsey and Hickling Broads easy to access. These areas are large open sections of water - great for sailing a yacht. We also ventured to Barton broad for a few days, and found this to be easy using a combination of motor and sail. The best part of our holiday was the warm welcome and help we received from Alison, Nick, Liz and the Oliver’s Sailing team. We chose to book with Oliver’s Sailing because they are a family company providing a good service for an all inclusive price with no hidden costs (ie parking, insurance, etc). Our experience lived up to this, and I cannot recommend them highly enough and can’t wait for a return visit! Thank you again. ”

“What an amazing holiday. Bright Spark truly is a delightful boat to sail. My sailing is typically in high performance dinghy like 49ers and 18ft skiffs so I doubted that I would be all that impressed with a vintage type boat, how wrong was I. My girlfriend and I spent 5 magical days cruising the broads we went at a very leisurely place and surprised our self’s with how much we got to see and how far we went. My girlfriend was a bit of a novice, she had spent some time on Sunsail yachts and could get a topper around a triangular course so the first thing we did was go to a broad get her on the helm and get her comfortable with helming and basic manoeuvres after an hour of that and one man over board (my glasses fell in the water so I decided in a split second to go after them) we were ready for our adventure and off we went. My girlfriend spent most of the time on the tiller whilst I looked after furling / lowering hoisting the sails and dropping / raising the mast at the bridges, all relativity easy tasks once you are shown the ropes on your induction sail out to Wroxham. The boat sails like a dream, and all the systems worked so smoothly, so well in fact most of the time we could furl / drop the sails have them tied up and drift leisurely up to a parking spot to step off and tie up all without turning the engine on, it really did handle like a small dinghy. If needed the engine was on in a heartbeat to get you to shore or upwind along a particularly narrow bit of broad. The kitchen is so well equipped you could cook a roast (no kidding). The pop top camper roof is brilliant, sleek whilst sailing with loads of room when you pull up for the night or just a cup of tea. You will soon get used to being the envy of the broads, just about every other sail boat has a positive comment on the top sail as you ghost past them effortless using the breaths of wind above the tree line. Get used to being photographed, you will be the most photogenic vessel on the water. I was hoping for a romantic, relaxed holiday and that’s exactly what we got, cruising down a particularly beautiful portion of the river Ant, I dropped to one knee and proposed she said yes so ultimately we had the best holiday ever, even with the occasional rain shower. Thanks so much to Alison and the team at Oliver Sailing Holidays for making the holiday so special and making the booking from another country / time zone so effortless. We live in Australia but we will be back for another holiday soon.”