Leg 4 is the leg the whole 2026 season has been building toward. From Durban the ship turns her shoulder into the Agulhas, the great warm current that boils down the east coast of southern Africa at up to five knots, and begins the long, deliberate work of getting a square-rigger around the Cape of Good Hope. This is not a scenic cruise. This is the rite of passage that separates blue-water sailors from everybody else, the stretch of ocean where Bartholomew Dias, da Gama and a thousand East Indiamen learned what the Southern Ocean means when it meets Africa’s last stone shoulder. Professional weather routing is mandatory from the moment the lines come off in Durban. The southwesterlies that sweep up from the Roaring Forties meet the south-running Agulhas head-on, and when they do the sea doesn’t just get rough, it builds the dødningebølger, the freak death waves that have bent and broken ships many times NEPTUN’s size. The crew will learn to wait for weather, to pick their windows, and to understand in their bones why the old sailors called this water the Cape of Storms before they called it anything else.

The leg is short in miles, 919 nm, barely five percent of the world voyage, but in seamanship it is the densest passage of the year. Durban to East London is 285 nm of coastal work where the Agulhas runs hardest and closest inshore; five prep days in East London are built into the plan to stage for the big one. Then the long 575 nm swing from East London down past Port Elizabeth, past Cape Agulhas, the true southernmost tip of Africa, and around the Cape of Good Hope into Table Bay. That is the passage every sailor on board came for. The 2026 sailors who round the Cape will have earned it, watch by watch, reef by reef, and will carry it the rest of their sailing lives.

Ashore, the contrast is enormous. Durban is big, humid, Indian-Ocean warm, full of curry houses and surf on the Golden Mile. East London is quiet colonial brickwork and the Buffalo River. Then Cape Town, one of the great cities of the world, Table Mountain filling half the sky, the old Dutch Castle and the V&A Waterfront, Stellenbosch and Franschhoek vineyards an hour inland, Boulders Beach and its African penguins a short drive south. The summer light here is long and clean, the wines are world-class, and after the run from Durban a glass of chenin on the foredeck hits differently.

Leg 4 ends with a 13-day Christmas and New Year lay-up in Cape Town, the season’s only real pause. The sails come down for maintenance, the rig is surveyed from the deck up, the crew scatters to family, friends and Karoo road trips, and the ship breathes. A short hop up to Saldanha rounds things out before the Atlantic crossing begins the 2027 season. The promise of Leg 4 is simple and old-fashioned: come south, prove yourself against the Cape, and then spend Christmas at the tip of Africa with Table Mountain out the porthole.