Leg 7 is the Caribbean leg, the reward after forty-four days crossing the South Atlantic and eight more propped on keel blocks in a Trinidadian boatyard. NEPTUN lifts off the hard with fresh antifouling on her belly, new zincs, a clean bronze prop, and the smell of paint still sharp on the rail. The ship that slides out of Chaguaramas on 23 April is essentially new again, and the 418 nm ahead is nothing like the ocean passages that came before. This is the holiday chapter of the voyage. Short hops between volcanic islands. Anchor down by sunset. Swim before breakfast. Fresh fish for supper. Trade winds blowing a steady 15-20 knots from the east, day after day, as reliable as a metronome.

The route climbs north through the arc of the Lesser Antilles, a chain of old volcanoes marching from South America up toward the Virgins, each island a sovereign little world. First stop is Carriacou in the Grenadines, an 18-square-mile speck where wooden sloops are still built on the beach at Windward village and the rum is served over ice with a slice of lime at Paradise Beach. Four prep days here let the crew re-provision, check the rig after the yard period, and dive the reefs of Sandy Island. Then it is one trade-wind day north to Martinique, French soil, French tricolore on the flagpole, patisseries in Fort-de-France and Creole accras de morue at the market. The contrast after the Grenadines is pure culture-shock: baguettes, Citroën vans, signs in a language nobody tried to speak in Carriacou. And then the longest hop of the leg, 160 nm up through the Guadeloupe passage to Antigua.

Antigua is the punctuation mark. English Harbour and Nelson’s Dockyard, the restored Georgian naval base where Admiral Nelson worked the British fleet through fever and hurricane, is the spiritual home of Atlantic tall-ship sailing. In late April it fills with the fleet gathering for Antigua Sailing Week and Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta: schooners from Maine, gaff cutters from Brittany, J-Class yachts from Newport, their crews spilling out of the Admiral’s Inn and the Galley Bar until the small hours. NEPTUN will tie up among them, a working brigantine at home in a harbour that has watched square-rig since the 1700s. There are three nights ashore to wander the Dockyard at dawn, hike the ridge to Shirley Heights on a Sunday evening for steel pan and rum punch, and lose an afternoon on Pigeon Beach watching the regatta fleet reach out past Cape Shirley.

The mood of Leg 7 is deliberately unhurried. Five sail days out of twenty-seven, the rest is ashore or at anchor. You will snorkel over a reef you did not know existed, learn a rum you had never heard of, eat a grilled snapper handed to you off a beach fire, and fall asleep to the anchor chain rumbling in the deck-pipe. After the ocean crossing of Leg 5 and the yard period that followed, the ship and her crew have earned this. By the time Shirley Heights lights come up off the port bow and NEPTUN rounds into English Harbour for the last time, the voyage will feel, briefly and completely, like a long warm exhalation.