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

This one is late because we went sailing!

Progress on my goals

Boat life

Water tank is still in place… and may wait for another weekend, because I’m ON LEAVE!!!

WOOHOO!!!

So we visited Alderney, the northern Channel Island.

Lady SierraWhiskyMike only has five days of leave but I’ve got a full fortnight off, so I can attack the tank again next week,

The whole holiday – including eating at restaurants and pubs for both nights – came to about £300 all in for the two of us, and only £100 of that was spent on travel and accommodation (i.e. a mooring buoy).

The weather was mainly sunny with light winds, so while it wasn’t necessarily exhilarating sailing the trip still tested my navigation skills and we twice picked up mooring buoys as a two-person team.

Being away is always cool, but we had essentially moved our home temporarily to Alderney for the visit and we’re now one step closer to being the super sailors we want to be.

Distractions and detours

HOLIDAY! CELEBRATE!

I’d sprinted through work last week to clear the decks and allow myself to take a (hopefully) uninterrupted leave period.

My co-workers are concerned that I’m not going away on holiday, but then I explained to them that we’re going sailing so we need a big window of opportunity to allow us to pounce on the right moment to go.

The fuel and dinners out have been budgeted for throughout the year and set aside into a slush fund. This also means that I still made my investments this month, so that’s all good, and it turned out to be cheaper than either of us had expected.

Non-FIRE goals

My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)

Another week without lessons due to my teacher being absent.

I’ve slacked a bit this week and will need to get back to routine before next week’s lessons!

Fitness

Managed another half marathon distance, this time at a reasonable pace, and pushed out on a 16-mile run.

Disappointingly, it turns out that I have misunderstood the “Zone 2” cardio zone and I’m still running too fast on the bigger distances. As a result, while I was happy with the 16-mile time, my joints and muscles were a little more sore than the half-marathon distance had been.

Final thoughts

Lived the boat life, even without a fresh water tank. That’s pretty awesome and has given me motivation to actually replace the tank now that we’re People Who Go Sailing in our floating home.

Fitness is going pretty well, can’t complain.

I’m letting myself down with guitar, but I’m also on leave. I’ll put more effort in over the weekend to practice and improve.

My financial independence campaign continues!