|
|
|
|
|
|
The Hacking Family |
WHAT'S NEW ON THE SITE
 |
Newcomers, see our Welcome to the Hacking family website with Sue, Jon, Chris, and Amanda on Ocelot, our 45-foot Wauquiez designed catamaran. We've been on this trip since December 2001, sailing from the northeast Caribbean through the Panama Canal, across the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean to Africa. Our trip has many goals, but a primary one is to teach ourselves, and especially our children, about the values, thought processes, and cultures of the different people in our world. Many people never learn what's important to other cultures and too often feel that other people should feel as they do. But we know that other cultures have very different values from our own, and we feel it's important, especially for the coming generation who will be leading our society in only a few years, to know this as well. We hope that with better understanding, future generations will be better equipped to defuse some of the strife that threatens world peace. Although sailing to Australia was our original goal when we left St. Maarten in 2002, we joined the Darwin-Kupang, Indonesia Rally which left in July 2006. This put us deeply into SE Asia, and formed a commitment to continue on around the world! After cruising Indonesia for 3 months we carried on up the Straits of Malacca through Malaysia and Thailand. Christopher, taking time off from university, re-joined us there for 3 months and sailed with us to Sri Lanka. Jon, Sue and Amanda spent the rest of 2007 on the voyage across the Indian Ocean, switching continents from Asia to Africa, with stops in the Maldives, Chagos Archipelago, Seychelles, Madagascar, Mozambique and South Africa. While we'd originally planned to go around South Africa and continue on to the Caribbean to sell Ocelot and move ashore for a while, we've recently decided that we'd like to continue cruising. So we're heading back to SE Asia! We plan to sail from Richards Bay, South Africa, in mid-May (after cyclone season has ended) for Mayotte, a small French atoll just west of northern Madagascar. The route from there leads into the northern Indian Ocean to catch the monsoon across to the northern Maldives and back to Langkawi, Malaysia. There we'll leave Ocelot in a marina and fly home to put Amanda in university. Sue and Jon plan to return to Ocelot in November - but like most cruisers, our plans are prone to change on short notice! Stay tuned! Ongoing improvements to photos -
|
||
|
----- April 2008 ----- Latest News! We've been in Richards Bay, South Africa since late November 2007 doing boat work and taking numerous inland trips in Southern Africa. We've posted illustrated versions of 9 newsletters we've sent over the past 6 months.
See our Madagascar Newsletters... ----- September 2007 ----- Sue has just completed 3 new pages on Sri Lanka Flora and Fauna.
But the artistic credit goes to Amanda and Chris who did the photography
of these beautiful birds and animals. ----- July 2007 ----- We've arrived in the Seychelles, in the western
Indian Ocean, and have posted illustrated versions of the newsletters we sent while on passage. We've now started a whole new Indian Ocean Landfalls section with almost 20 new
pages! Our first area to cover is Indonesia, with 6 brand new pages on the places we visited. Other new Indian Ocean Landfalls areas we've added include: Our Reef Animals (previously Underwater Photos) section has been considerably
expanded with the many new species of fish that we've photographed in the Indian Ocean The cooks have added 15 new cruising recipes, and a whole new page on different breads. We've now trashed our old, automatically generated site map
in favor of a much more compact and intuitive page with explanations. Want to build your own website? Jon has published some tricks
and traps for others attempting to put together a website like ours.
|
----- September 2007 ----- Jon has expanded his FrontPage information with a new FrontPage
Frequently Asked Questions page. Our Boat Guests section has now been brought up to the standards
of the rest of the site. Previous visitors especially should check
it out! ----- July 2007 ----- We did some great scuba dives in Indonesia, Thailand and the Maldives, with some of
our best dives to date. We've also included GPS locations for our dives. Amanda has added a new section of journal entries she's written, including
day-by-day descriptions of our travels through interior Thailand and Sri Lanka. Our Cruising Info section has really expanded (over 25 pages now)
so we've divided it up by oceans. We've moved Sue's Cruising Recipes
and Provisioning there, and added new pages on S Pacific weather & schedules,
Australia, Indonesia, Galle (Sri Lanka) and the Maldives. We've tried something new in our Cruising Info section: We've
added a big page that includes descriptions, depths, photos, and exact positions
of all 38 anchorages we visited in Indonesia. Since there's no cruising
guide for Indonesia, we hope that this will help cruisers following our wake. We did the same with Australia, adding a big page that includes positions, depths, detailed
descriptions, and photos of all 32 anchorages we visited in Australia. Sue has greatly expanded her Australian Flora & Fauna section, especially the birds! Jon has started brewing his own beer and found it's not only cheap
but fun and tasty! He's added a section on how to do this on board.
|
||
 |
Check out our Landfalls pages, divided between the Caribbean, Pacific, and Indian Ocean to see where we've been and our impressions of each place. Amanda has done an extraordinary job with the 'hot-spotted' maps throughout the Landfalls section, making the geography much more intuitive. |
|
Our Newsletters section has now been split up into Pacific Ocean Newsletters and Indian Ocean Newsletters. Both contain newly illustrated copies of the email newsletters we send out. These reflect our at-the-moment thoughts and feelings, often written on passage. If you want to receive our newsletters as email, please contact us. |
|
Our new Cruising Information section contains valuable cruiser-specific information for cruisers following in our wake, such as articles on cruising with teens, transiting the Panama Canal, yacht provisioning and recipes, frequently asked questions, as well as pages on specific areas like the Galapagos, Marquesas, Tonga, Fiji, Australia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. We've also added links to other cruiser sites and some downloadable MaxSea Layer files. |
|
The Flora and Fauna section documents many of the plants and animals we've encountered, broken down by region. There's also a Marine Mammals section. |
|
The Underwater pages showcase our underwater photography, reef life and scuba diving. Dive sites include GPS locations so others can find these sites as well. |
|
On our Ocelot pages you can see pictures of the boat from the deck, cockpit, and inside, her layout, specifications and even some of the modifications we've made to turn her into an ocean cruiser. |
|
Jon is an Electrical & Computer Engineer (see his resume) so his pages include his technical slant on some of the boat systems as well as a collection of stories from when we cruised in the 1980s. |
|
Sue's pages give insights into the cruising life and include things like provisioning information. Sue, aka Sue Muller Hacking, is a writer (see her bio) with several published books and hundreds of articles to her credit. |
|
Chris, while no longer aboard full time, has written about our inland travels, underwater photography, his projects and schooling. |
|
Amanda brings her unique teen perspective, logs of our Asian travels and school projects. The awesome interactive maps throughout the site are her handiwork. |
|
The Boat Guests pages are designed to make everyone jealous of our visitors and want to come down themselves! We've even included a What to Bring page. |
Ocelot's Cumulative Sailing Statistics for 2002-2007 |
Sailing Stats: As of 16 August 2007 we've been
cruising for 5.6 years (67 months or 2,054 days) (Note - A hard-disk crash wiped our data so this section is out of date):
|
Home | Landfalls | Cruising Info | Underwater | Boat Guests | Ocelot | Sue | Jon | Amanda | Chris | Site Map
Copyright © 2000-2008 Jon and Sue Hacking -- HackingFamily.com. All rights reserved
