Leg 2 is the Africa reveal. Neptun slips her mooring in Le Port with the black basalt cliffs of Réunion still warm behind her, points her bowsprit west-northwest, and sets out on the short, bright-blue hops that stitch the French Indian Ocean to the Swahili coast. After Leg 1’s long open-water crossing, this stretch is a change of pace, 1,391 nautical miles broken into four distinct chapters, with enough time in each port to step ashore, wash off the salt, and actually meet the place. Sail days are short. Port days are long. The rhythm is the rhythm of a working trade-wind route, the same rhythm baghlah and jahazi dhows have kept for a thousand years.

The character of the leg is transition. You leave behind Creole France, boulangeries that open at five in the morning, volcanic peaks veiled in cloud, rougail saucisse for lunch, euros in the cash drawer, and, waypoint by waypoint, sail into Africa. Nosy Be hands you Madagascar with both fists: baobabs, lemurs, ylang-ylang perfume hanging over the anchorage at dusk, and a market where the vanilla pods are as long as your forearm. Mayotte is the hinge, still French, still euros, but already half-Swahili, with veiled women in bright salouva wraps and a lagoon so wide and so blue you will forget, briefly, that the ocean exists outside it. Then the Mozambique Channel and the final 429-mile run to Zanzibar, where the muezzin’s call crosses the harbour at dawn and the whole ship smells of cloves before you have even tied up.

The sailing itself is generous. August is the heart of the southeast trades in this corner of the world, steady fifteen-to-twenty-knot winds on the starboard quarter, a warm following sea, and a sky that builds tall cotton-wool cumulus by mid-afternoon and rinses clean again by dusk. The Mozambique Channel has a reputation for moods, but the southern hemisphere winter is its gentlest season, and Neptun should have square sails drawing most of the way. Expect flying fish skating across the bow wave, pods of spinner dolphins off Madagascar’s northwest tip, and, if you are lucky and the humpbacks are on their migration, whale blows on the horizon as you close Mayotte.

Ashore, the leg asks you to be curious. There are lemurs to find in the Lokobe reserve, a volcano to climb at dawn, a turquoise lagoon to dive, a thousand-year-old slave market to stand quietly inside, and a dozen dhow-builders along the Zanzibar waterfront still cutting mango-wood ribs with hand-adzes. This is not a leg to sleep through. By the time Neptun clears customs in Stone Town on September tenth, you will have crossed a cultural border as real as any ocean.