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

Technically, this should be 80, but I did Campaign Plan 2025 instead of last week’s update. I thought that was probably better value than a weekly check-in!

Progress on my goals

Boat life

Literally at the same time as Campaign Plan 2025 hit inboxes of all e-mail subscribers, we stumbled back from a New Year’s Even party at the marina bar to discover that our lights weren’t working.

Any of them.

After some panicking with a head torch and kicking all the furniture like the drunken reprobates we were, we discovered that the trip switch for the auxiliary power had been triggered and that had isolated our 12-volt system. You know – the one that basically does everything on our boat apart from the mains plug sockets.

So we were charging our phones and keeping the radiator on at least.

No problem, we’ll just switch that back on… or so we thought.

About five minutes later, we heard a groan that sounded like me waking up in the morning, and the auxiliary power tripped again.

One more time…

Well, only two minutes passed on the second go before it tripped again. Bugger. Needed to do some digging in the electrical bay.

What is it?!

We spent the rest of the week living by head torches and camping lights. Yesterday, we attacked the problem.

I’d expected that the batteries had failed. We don’t know how old those leisure batteries are, it seemed so likely. Lady SierraWhiskyMike suspected the two tiny LED reading lights I’d put in two weeks before (the cheek of it!).

We spent most of the day probing around with a multimeter in bits of the boat that I wish I spent less time in. Finally, after hours of checking connections and troubleshooting to isolate bits of the boat’s electronics, we discovered the problem.

Our inverter has died. RIP.

We initially thought that was a £120 replacement. Still, cheaper than £600 of batteries that I’d thought we’d need before we started rummaging. Then we looked up the model of inverter we had, and it turns out that it doesn’t actually do anything on our boat.

What it’s meant to do is power the mains sockets when we’re not plugged into shore power. We have a separate battery charger and that turned out to be working fantastically well, so it wasn’t keeping our batteries topped up. When we’re on shore power, the inverter is bypassed anyway. We thought it might be for running the fridge, but that seems fine on 12-volt.

Well, we don’t plan to use mains electricity on anchor. There’s no good reason to do that before we have some kind of solar panel capability, which we don’t yet have, because our battery bank doesn’t have that kind of capacity. One of our pre-departure checks is to confirm that we’re not operating the mains sockets.

So we simply turned it off. Turns out that’s the problem all along and our inverter actually doesn’t do anything for us.

I appreciate that’s probably an anticlimax for you, but that answer has probably taken us 12 hours of investigation to learn. And now I don’t need to make an emergency spend on something that it turns out we weren’t using or buy batteries that I’d dreaded paying for.

Hooray!

Hatch leaking

Nothing starts my day off better than water dripping onto my face. Fantastic.

It looks like the hatch I’d fitted in our cabin last spring has developed a small leak and now needs re-doing. Eurgh.

To be fair, it’s better to know about this now than to find out when we take a big wave over the bow during our sailing. As grumpy as I’m feeling, there are worse ways to find this out.

Looks like this afternoon’s task is to set a tarpaulin over the cabin hatch. If that fails, I’m going to sleep in the sea berths in the saloon. That’s boat slang for I’m sleeping on the sofa bed.

Repairing isn’t a big deal. All we need is two clear days where the temperature is above 10 degrees Celsius and it’s not raining. In January. Cool.

Distractions and detours

Rings of Power

We learned that we still had a week or two of Amazon Prime leftover from a purchase we’d made over Christmas, so we watched season 2 of The Rings of Power. This is Amazon’s spin-off prequel series to The Lord of the Rings and other associated films.

General assessment is that it’s simultaneously lore-heavy while the characters are overly simplistic. Without giving away any spoilers, viewers will appreciate how every “motivational speech” is an odd selection of complex metaphors that seem to be all you need to mount a complicated logistical operation like deploying an army or executing a complex battlefield manoeuvre.

Classic Tolkien analogies like “we’re the goodies, so we’re the light side” abound, as does the standard racial profiling of every political faction involved in their world, and Plot Armour is very noticeable.

The first series is pretty good and worth watching. Amazon introduce a semi-complex and well-rounded baddie in that series who is frankly the most interesting character. The first half of this second series carries it on but the ending feels clumsy.

Reading: The Revenge of Analog

I read The Revenge of Analog by David Sax this week on Kindle [affiliate link].

Less of a scientific paper and more of a journalism piece, the book is the 2016 basis to his recent work The Future is Analog, which I haven’t read yet.

I’d heard David speak on The Art of Manliness podcast. Effectively, his opinion is that in an increasingly digitised world there’s a counter movement returning to analogue technologies because they provide a multi-sensory experience.

Despite the name, The Art of Manliness has nothing to do with “manosphere” influencers of the Andrew Tate kind. Brett McKay started it to encourage men to be better versions of themselves by learning skills, self-reliance, good manners, keeping fit and reading to keep the mind active. It’s unfortunate that the branding is now old enough to sound cringeworthy.

It’s still a great podcast to follow if you’re not a man.

For example, one of the first case studies he looks at in the books is the return of vinyl records. Objectively, a digital music file is more convenient. However, there’s a whole experience with vinyl records that a streaming service can never provide: the physical product, the emotional response to the artwork, the audio artefacts on playing the record, the ritual of placing the record onto the turntable and moving the needle… yeah, I get it.

It’s a great read, fairly easy to get to grips with, and while some of it is a bit out of date (it’s eight years old now) I’d still recommend the book.

My response to reading it

This book has appealed to me. While I can’t fit an LP player on the boat and like having fewer physical things, there’s something that’s been bothering me about the over-proliferation of “smart” technologies and reliance on digitisation where it’s not necessarily helpful. More recently, the inclusion of intrusive AI assistance into every possible software application irritates me.

I’m also a little conscious that things like streaming services are bad for music, film and television, and it feels wrong to me that “ownership” seems to have been replaced by “XXXX-as-a-Service”. I don’t really care about that for television series because I tend to watch things once and rarely return to them, but looking at my Spotify I can see that I tend to gravitate to a curated list of music.

Am I paying for this because it doesn’t feel expensive to have a capped budget? Because I’m afraid of missing out? Or simply because it’s convenient to have on all my devices? The more I think about it, the more questions and fewer answers I have.

Physical media – analogue or otherwise – isn’t the answer for my lifestyle. Where would I even put it? How would I stop it getting wet? I’m having a hard enough time with regular books.

However, I’m thinking that returning to MP3 purchases might actually be a good idea. I still have a vast library of MP3s that I don’t listen to except when I’m using my second-hand iPod Nano in the gym or on a run, purely because my default is to use the Spotify account I’m paying for.

Not fully formed on this, but that’s my initial thoughts on this book.

Non-FIRE goals

My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)

I spent a fair bit of time over Christmas Day playing guitar but playing has been a bit hit-and-miss since. Need to fit in more practice sessions.

Pre-Christmas we spent a lesson trying to play Rainbow in the Dark by Dio. At the time I was concerned that I’d come to the lesson over-caffeinated and not prepared to learn. Sure enough, I can confirm that I don’t remember a thing about that lesson or the song, so that went well.

I’m going to have to regain the initiative when I’m not doing boat repairs.

Fitness

I’ve started running again. While my foot is a little achey still, I can’t sit around forever. I’d dropped the distance to simply doing shorter, faster runs this week to get back into the swing of training to run 2-3 times per week.

Will start to do some long and slow runs next week.

I’ve essentially binned off drinking until the end of January. A not-quite-dry January. This means I should have a bit more energy to train and recover during the month.

Final thoughts

New Year, new problems!

It sounds like I’m whingeing on the blog, but ultimately I’m happy with living on my boat. The cost of adventure is adversity, and this is just one of those times where I have to pay up.

Realistically though it shouldn’t be too big an ask to re-bed the forward hatch when the weather clears. I know what I’m doing, now. The fact that the other hatch in the saloon isn’t leaking suggests that it was a skill issue with the original fitting rather than a procedural error, so I can get that sorted.

Just need a clear weather window…

My financial independence campaign continues!