Exploring the Famous Cook's Bay Off Tahiti

Join ABC News in tracking one couple's trip around the world.

ByABC News
August 4, 2009, 10:34 AM

August 4, 2009 — -- In April 2000, husband and wife Neville and Catherine Hockley fell head-over-heels for the sailboat Dream Time in a Long Island parking lot. In June 2007, they packed up their stationary lives in New York and set sail for an eight- to ten-year adventure on the water.

Today, Dream Time is the couple's home and office as they sail around the world, working remotely to run a New York-based design studio while blogging about their journey and documenting the people and places they discover along the way.

The plan is a complete circumnavigation that will take the Hockleys across the Pacific to New Zealand and Australia, then up to southeast Asia and over to India. They intend to travel up the Red Sea to Cairo before exploring the Mediterranean, crossing the Atlantic and returning to New York City.

Read excerpts from their adventure below and join ABC News in tracking their travels. The couple is on the island of Moorea at present.

We're anchored in the famous Cook's Bay on the island of Moorea, which lies just 10 nautical miles off Tahiti's northwest coast. We've been exploring the island for five days, two of those days on bicycles which we hired from 'Fun Bike', one of the only two bike rental businesses on the island.

Now I'm not usually one to complain, and our journal entries are usually of a positive nature, but unless you're staying at one of the swanky resorts that boast their own private shiny inventory of new bikes, I strongly recommend, should you find yourself on Moorea one day, that you hire a scooter, car, beach buggy, ATV, hitchhike or just walk instead. You see, the name 'Fun Bike' is just a little misleading. Sure the 'bike' portion is true enough, they do in fact rent them, but with saddles like rolling pins, brakes that just barely reduce your speed, frames lathered in oil, greasy chains that refuse to stay on the gears, and one peddle that just clean snapped right off, we were sadly a little shortchanged on the 'fun' portion of our rental experience.