Leg 3 is the African coast chapter, nine weeks threaded between the East African shore and the deep blue of the Mozambique Channel. From Zanzibar, the old spice entrepôt where the smell of cloves and cardamom still leaks from Stone Town’s warehouses, NEPTUN sails south in the footsteps of the nahodha, the dhow captains who have worked these waters for a thousand years. The southeast trades fill the squares, the swell comes long and warm off the Indian Ocean, and the coast unrolls to starboard as a green line of coconut palms, baobabs and mangrove creeks. This is classic downwind sailing, but with the texture of a continent pressed up against the rail.

The rhythm of the leg is slow and deliberate: a short hop to Mafia Island for our first quiet anchorage off the African mainland, then a long reach down to Nacala in northern Mozambique, one of the finest natural harbours in Africa and a port few yachts ever see. From there the longest passage of the leg, 918 nm down the length of the Mozambique Channel to Maputo, where Portuguese colonial façades line the Avenida Julius Nyerere and the Polana still pours gin and tonics at sundown. The Channel itself is a place of big, friendly trade winds punctuated by fast-moving low-pressure systems the crew will learn to read from the sky.

Ashore, this leg leans heavily into culture and history. Zanzibar’s Omani doors and Swahili coral-stone houses; Mafia’s reef-fringed baobab villages; Nacala’s dusty railhead and turquoise bay; Maputo’s Mercado Central piled with piri-piri, cashews and matapa; Durban’s Indian quarter, curry houses and the vast Bluff sheltering Africa’s busiest port. Malaria is a working reality in all four African stops, anti-malarials and mosquito nets are standard kit, briefed before we clear Zanzibar and carried the whole way south. It is part of how the tropics here are, not a reason to stay away.

By the time Umhlanga light appears off the port bow and we round in for Durban’s harbour entrance, you will have sailed the last great warm-water leg of the voyage. Ahead lies the Agulhas and the Cape, the serious water of the Southern Ocean approaches. Leg 3 is the long, sunlit goodbye to the Indian Ocean before the ship turns her shoulder to the south.