Many of our boater friends, asked us about keeping busy, now that we are land based.
This is not just an issue around moving ashore, but one that everyone who is retiring has to answer. In our case, we retired from work twice now. The first time, in 2016/17 when we both left our jobs, sold our sailboat, and our house on the Northshore in Auckland, and bought Southern Star and flew to Florida to move aboard and start our new boating life.
And now the second retirement came when we sold Southern Star, and moved back on land and moved to Christchurch.
Our first retirement, selling everything we had and moving onto Southern Star, was more of a life reconfiguration. We were relatively young, 58 years old. We had saved hard for many years, and decided to travel by boat, while we were young and game enough.
The boat became our full time job, with much of the stresses of working life, but with the benefits of exploring exotic places and meeting similar thinking people. We loved it.
Our identity and purpose of life ‘le sens de la vie’ was the boat.
After about 5 years we decided to take Southern Star back to New Zealand, in 2020, and arranged to have her shipped. (Our previous blog has more details on our boat life including this long chapter. )
It was evident to us, that owning Southern Star, was going to be financially, something we could not maintain without earning some decent money, and so we returned to NZ to work and continued to live on board while we did.
When Jenny and I reached the age of 65 and were entitled to our Super-Annuation, retirement, we took it, and went cruising to Fiji. This was similar to our original retirement, in that we were now working full time at boating.
After we returned after the cruising season in Fiji was finished, we decided it was time to retire from boating as well as paid work. We couldn’t continue our Southern Star life without at least one of us working full time. We eventually found a buyer for Southern Star almost a year after returning from Fiji.
We were happy with the sales price. This allowed us to be cash buyers and when we moved to Christchurch, we had already found a nice townhouse in St Albans.
NOW, we are really retired. Boatless and living on land. Our life is radically different. No more maintenance emergencies, haul out stress and huge bills that followed.
Now though…how do we keep busy, how do we keep fit and healthy now that we are not doing boat yoga, repairing stuff, or doing 6 hours of boat cleaning and cutting and polishing the hull to keep Southern Star running well and shining.
And that is now our challenge, being truly retired. Our townhouse is only 5 years old, so there is very little maintenance needed. I had to change a bathroom tap seal, so far.
Jenny has always been a gym bunny, she enjoys keeping fit and working out. She joined “City Fitness” and they have a great membership, that allows us to go as much as we like together for a single membership price.
And so she has turned me into a bit of a gym bunny as well, We both go to the local gym in the city. We walk there, 20 minutes each way, and we do an hour workout, every other day.
We have been pretty religious about this, only missing workouts when we are away, or doing a road trip. We have done a few and plan to do more.
Our off days, we try to find a new place in Christchurch to visit. The bus system here is really good. We can get most anywhere in the city and some to the outer areas by bus. And with our Super Gold Card (NZ Super) we get to travel on the bus for free.
We have evolved into taking the bus somewhere new each week, especially if we have good weather, and doing long walks on non gym days, sometimes with my SLR camera, and are becoming acquainted with the city. We have averaged 120 kilometers per month, for the last 3-4 months. I will post more on these local trips later on.
We have also been planning a major trip to Europe, during the middle of our NZ winter.
And so this has given us something to work on, and to look forward to . We met another couple. Pete and Suz, on a similar boat, a Nordhavn 43, named ‘Opal Lady’ while we were in Fiji. We travelled together for part of our Fiji trip, and buddy boated back together on the seven day passage to New Zealand from Fiji.
Pete and Suz sold Opal Lady, before we sold Southern Star, and they bought a Canal Boat in France. They invited us to join them in France, after we were ‘retired’. And so that is a big factor in why we are planning to go to Europe this winter (in about 5 weeks time) .
And that is how this retirement looks so far for us.
We seem to have found a nice routine, that helps us to stay healthy, and we are fitter than we have been in decades.
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