That's what we did. We also used his World Cruising Handbook to tell us what to expect once we arrived in each country. Get the latest edition of this book just before departure, as the information is always changing. We joked with friends that if we stayed in one place an extra week or two, then we'd have to wait another year. In a sense this is true, if you don't want to be pushing the edges of the seasons and risk bad weather, or a slow passage.
Every passage is contingent on the one before it.
The quickest you can comfortably circumnavigate is about 18 months, but this is very quick, without much time for the inevitable boat repairs. We decided to spend a summer in New Zealand since Alec has relatives there. This gave us a five-month hiatus to explore New Zealand and a chance for six weeks in the boat yard to fix everything that broke or obtain what was now needed after the first year crossing the South Pacific. We also decided to go through the Med, instead of around South Africa. At the time, South Africa was trying to dismantle apartheid, whereas the Red Sea was in a remarkable period of peace.