Thoughts and reflections form the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.

Progress on my goals

Boat plan

We’ve rushed back to the Channel Islands from France because there’s a big storm coming in today and over the rest of the week, but it’s been a blast to be in France for six days!

Our route in the end was as follows:

Day 1: sail out from our home marina to Port de Saint Cast (Saint Cast-le-Guildo).

Days 2-3: faff about and enjoy St Cast-le-Guildo. It’s a really cool place to visit, recommend.

Day 4: sail from Port de Saint Cast to Port de Saint Quays (Saint Quays-Portrieux)

Day 5: faff about and enjoy St Quays-Portrieux area.

Day 6: sail back from Port de Saint Quays to home port.

That’s about 140 miles of sailing in three stints, plus a bit of hiking, sightseeing, exploration and eating fine French food.

Budgets wise, the holiday has cost about £600. We’ve gone to restaurants for dinners, because it’s a holiday, and the going rate for moorings was about £35 per night. We should probably refuel, but we sail wherever we can and that’s probably only £100 to top the tank back up I reckon, if that.

Below is a mini-gallery of the photos I took on the sailing – well, stuff that doesn’t have our faces in.

Maybe one day I’ll start sharing content that directly identifies me, but I’m not there yet and if I make myself known in the Channel Islands then the whole archipelago will know that I’m not serious if I tell an interviewer “yes, I see myself working here in five years”.

Bit of a disadvantage, not keen to do that yet for temporary internet fame.

Lessons from the big sailing trip in 2025

We’re not bad sailors!

We can totally sail for a long time. We’ve got the sailing skills to do longer trips, now.

Our nav is pretty good, the boat fit-out is appropriate, and we can handle moderate seas.

So that’s basically a win! I feel like we’ve levelled up as day sailors. I wouldn’t be intimidated by sailing our home on a 12-24 hour passage at all. We’ve got this, even as a two-person crew.

Boat apps are not to be trusted

We used Windy and Savvy Navvy to help us forecast weather and confirm our route selections.

I can 100% confirm that they’re just a voice of consultation and not to be trusted to do, well, anything.

Windy tends to over-forecast. This scared us a little when it suggested we were getting an early arrival of the predicted hurricane winds, which just didn’t happen. It also over-eggs the risks of sea states, and the colour palette is a little over-keen, making us more concerned about what turned out to be gentle rolling waves that we needed to be.

Savvy Navvy was frankly a disappointment. It proposes over-waypointed routes, frequent unnecessary angle changes, and inappropriate routes through fields of submerged rocks. It’s OK to use on-the-fly to work out an estimated arrival time (and therefore how long you can lie in the next morning before you leave!), but it’s no replacement for just doing the route plan yourself.

Our actual nav is pretty solid

I’m only an RYA Day Skipper level, but our nav was on point. Consistently.

I can probably handle more challenging navigation, but for now we’re not doing that kind of sailing so maybe 2026-2027 I’ll look at Yachtmaster theory exams and stuff.

But yeah, Day Skipper theory will get you from England to Northern France and around the Channel Islands, no dramas.

We used a Chartplotter too, which is really good for visual confirmation (“Are we nearly there yet?”) and for spotting other boats on AIS readings, but we still passage plan manually and it definitely pays off.

We also adapted styles to suit the wind direction and gain boosts from favourable tides, so we definitely levelled up in our nav this trip.

We need to work on our operating routine

While I’ve got no qualms about doing any coastal/ day sailing/ overnight crossings, we are still pretty knackered by the time we get in.

We’ve been chatting this through and we could do with working out a more relaxing, steady-state operating routine before we try to tackle multi-day passages. Otherwise, we’re at risk of burning ourselves out over a 48-hr+ sail, because we’re both staying active for the whole trip and not really resting up.

Something to think about on our side. We might look to join some other people on a long passage to see some ideas for how to deal with this.

Progress on the Boat Plan

We’re bang on track for where I was hoping we would be when we first kicked off the boat plan, two years ago.

We’re now fairly accomplished at a local level and can get from England to the Channel Islands, between the Channel Islands and to France and back. That’s… not nothing!

We probably aren’t going to get much further while we’re still living with our elderly dog. It’s not fair on him to leave him for a month or to take him sailing for long passages, and I refuse to leave him behind. He’s such a good boy!

So for the next couple of years I think we need to consolidate a bit and maybe do some more local sailing and/or trips back to England or France. Things that are challenging enough, but well within our capabilities now, just to get more practice and experience.

To refine what we know, as it were. Add a bit of finesse.

I’ve had a look at the RYA Yachtmaster Coastal criteria and we might be able to get the prerequisites ticked off if we do a few more local sails this year and next year. That could be useful, because Yachtmaster Coastal has become the minimum commercial qualification (so there’s potential to earn from the skills we want to develop anyway) and because it might make our insurance cheaper.

Still, if we don’t feel ready, there’s no pressure. We have the minimum qualifications to do the stuff we want to do for the next few years anyway. Additional qualifications in sailing are nice-to-haves, but far from essential.

A thing to think about later, not really a problem for right now.

Distractions and detours

Street art photos

After last year’s street art tour, I’ve gained a new interest in going to see different bits of street art and graffiti. A new appreciation for it, I guess?

Anyway, we saw some cool stuff in France during our trip. Lots of it was commissioned, but some of it seems a little more subversive and fun. I’m a big fan of how the French towns and cities adopt it, it seems to be the case that good street art is left in place for quite some time. I also see a lot of use of different materials, like the Scrabble tile art in the photos below, and stuff that’s hidden in plain sight.

The Bepop stuff seemed to be a bit of a tour. We found four items: the lady with the filming marker board was practically in the countryside, but it was near a sailor’s church, so it was both on-and-off the beaten path.

When we got back, we went to see an exhibition of street art in our local gallery, plus a Warhol print that’s on display until this Saturday. I was less excited – but still pretty happy – with a lot of the gallery stuff, because it feels (and is) over-commercialised: the works were on display with all the paraphernalia associated with being subversive, communicative street art, but they were slightly sanitised pieces and all of them were available for sale. It was a little clear that any message the artist might wanted to send was going to have its punch pulled a little bit in favour of finding potential buyers amongst the Channel Islands’ wealthier residents, and there’s something… icky, maybe?… lacking in integrity?… about that. Can’t blame the artist, they have to eat, but it was a bit sad in some cases.

Actually, that’s maybe unfair. The same artists whose work was in the gallery had also been invited to paint over a lot of abandoned and empty buildings on the street that the art gallery is in, and those works were a little more ambitious and lively. Maybe there’s something to be said for where and how you experience a work that influences what you read into it?

Non-FIRE goals

My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)

I’ve been super lazy with guitar on my travels so I need to get back on that horse. Going to have to put some serious effort in tomorrow and the rest of the week to catch up. Oh no, what a shame! Please don’t make me do more fun things!

Fitness

We’ve been pretty active and easily gotten our steps in with each port.

Sailing isn’t exactly a big fitness activity, but it works the core muscles and stabilisers pretty hard. We’ve also gotten stiff fingers from a lot of gybing, tacking and other rope-pulling work on the boat, so it’s better than nothing.

Will need to get a serious workout in this week before we go back to work on Monday and start routine again.

Final thoughts

Yeah, we need to be doing this boat thing. My repairs have all worked – albeit we have a hatch seal that’s now being a total dick when it gets hot outside – so I think we’re now getting a few benefits from having put the effort in.

One of my next jobs is to fit a calorifier element so we get hot water on demand (ish), so that shows the level of seriousness of the remaining jobs. Hot water on demand so I don’t need to boil a kettle for washing up. Oh no, the inconvenience!

We’re probably also going to replace the anchor chain and add a bit more so that we can do more anchoring. I was hoping to do some this week, but the 10m spring tides meant that we couldn’t find anywhere where our 30m of rusty iron chain was going to hold up at high tide.

Eh, no big deal. We had a banging holiday for like £600 for the pair of us. I’m happy enough.

My next big project is going to be: how do I set my life up so I can do more of this boat stuff and less of the corporate stuff I don’t care about?.

Which is a hard question with no easy long-term answer. At least, none that’s obvious to me right now.

Worst case? I’ll just keep on working and investing until there’s a nice FI number that can sustain, say, £2,000 a month – probably around £500k in investments. That’s a big, scary ask though, and one that’s going to take some time. Ideally I’d think of something that gets me more of what I want to do faster while that amount of assets/income is being built up.

This will probably mean some kind of remote work, alternative income stream, ability to earn while travelling, or maybe even working temporary jobs for half a year to fund sailing for the rest of it.

I haven’t figured out any of the details yet, but I’ll play with the idea as Campaign Year 2025 progresses.

My financial independence campaign continues!