Exploring the World's Smallest Nation

Oct. 27, 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 spent last month on the island of Niue.

Before we set off on this grand adventure my geographical knowledge of these parts was pretty limited. The thousands of little dots on our world globe spread across the vast stretch of ocean between the Americas and Australia seemed too numerous to count, let alone memorize.

But the South Pacific has been our home now for six months, and while many of the tiny islands are still as foreign to me as, say a map of the New Jersey Turnpike to a Cook Islander, I am now at least a little more familiar with the eastern side of the Pacific and look forward to exploring her western islands.