Thoughts and reflections form the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Progress on my goals
Boat plan
Weather hasn’t been favourable until today. I’m proud to say I’m finishing this while sailing off the coast of Jersey!
The route plan is to go to Saint-Cast-le-Guildo. From there, we plan to head West up to Paimpol and Île-de-Bréhat during the week-and-a-bit, depending on weather windows
I spent yesterday tarting things up and backloading any unnecessary equipment to our storage unit.
Preparing to sail is one of those jobs that takes up whatever amount of time is allocated to it, so I’m expecting this to be an all-day thing. I know that if I only gave myself an hour I could just stow everything in a fit of panic and we could go, buuuut if I’ve got all day to do it…
Sail so far has been fairly smooth. Slight problem with our furling headsail early on but we’re presently overtaking a much fancier sailing boat with our 23-year-old sails up, so overall pretty good so far.
Distractions and detours
Microbrewery party!
A friend of my brother-in-law runs a microbrewery side gig. Once a year (or every two years or so) they’ve been hosting a garden party with almost 30 beers they’ve brewed on tap.
The weather wasn’t conducive to sailing so we figured “Why not?”.
Sunday was a total write off and now Lady SierraWhiskyMike has caught a cold from mingling with a whole bunch of people in close quarters.
The party was pretty banging, though. Definitely worth it. No regrats.
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
No I guitar for the next fortnight because both my teacher and I are on holiday.
In the meantime, I’m going to do a bit more practicing and might learn a song on my own. Build up the repertoire and all that.
Fitness
Did a lot of cycling to work this week and still got my gym sessions in.
Lady SierraWhiskyMike came with me to do some rings training at the Napoleonic Fort gym. It was cool to train together, the workout doesn’t take very long and because it’s basically one set of each exercise “until it’s not fun anymore” there’s no disadvantage to training with people of different skill levels.
OK, some of the benefits will have been overridden by going to a brewery party. That’s entirely fair. But in general I think I was pretty active this week!
Lady SierraWhiskyMike put me onto a thing called rope flow that might help with spine mobility. There’s a guy called Nsima Inyang who featured on the Tim Ferris Show podcast, so I thought I’d check him out. We have some mooring lines that have frayed and would be unsuitable for use, but I can probably cut the frayed parts off and have enough rope to try this stuff out.
The appeal is that my body is pretty stiff from years of military service and later weightlifting. Calisthenics is definitely undoing some of the damage, but I could probably stand to improve my mobility and flexibility a bit more so that I can keep living on boats and in other weirdly-shaped spaces for many years to come.
I’ll give rope flow a go because I don’t think this is going to cost me any money to play with and maybe I’ll see some improved mobility. Probably a thing to deal with after this sailing trip, though.
Final thoughts
Well we’re on leave and doing The Thing, so obviously morale is high and we’re feeling punchy today.
It’s funny: on the first draft of this post I had loads of thoughts about financial independence and economics, but because I’m finishing it while it’s Lady SeirraWhiskyMike’s turn on the helm and pretty in the moment I can’t honestly remember what they were.
Oh well! I’m going to enjoy the moment for a bit. Have a great week!
My financial independence campaign continues!
