Leg 8 is the Atlantic passage home, the classic tall-ship spring route from the Caribbean back to European latitudes. For three centuries, yachts and square-riggers have taken the same diagonal NEPTUN will now sail: up from Antigua on the northeast trades, a pit-stop on Bermuda for the halfway rest, then out into the long empty reach of the North Atlantic toward the Azores. It is the route of the Bermuda Race fleet, of the ARC Europe, and of countless delivery skippers bringing boats home before the hurricane season gets serious. Two thousand eight hundred and seventy-six nautical miles, fifty-six days, two landfalls, one pink and British, one emerald and Portuguese.

The first passage lifts off English Harbour within hours of the leg-7 crew’s arrival, a short turnaround by design. The ship noses out past Shirley Heights, picks up the trades on the beam, and the Caribbean drops astern. Eleven days of blue-water reaching bring the flat green smudge of Bermuda up on the horizon. Bermuda is a pink coral afterthought in the middle of the ocean, a string of islands formed on the rim of an extinct volcano, with the palest sand in the Atlantic, British colonial pastel houses, white tiered roofs catching rainwater, and St George’s old narrow lanes where rum swizzle has been served since the 1600s. Five prep days here reset the ship: re-provision, scrub the hull, rig-check, weather-brief. Six nights ashore let the crew properly meet Hamilton, Horseshoe Bay, the pink beaches and the crystal caves.

Then the real ocean begins. The 1,931 nm from Bermuda to Ponta Delgada is the longest open-water passage of the homecoming half of the voyage, twenty-three days with no land, no ports, nothing but the ship, the watches, and the North Atlantic in its June mood. The route arcs north of the Azores High, catching the westerlies on the quarter, with the occasional front sweeping through to remind the crew that this is not the trades any more. It is long, slow, rhythmic sailing, sun sights and night watches, flying fish on deck, the slow turning of the stars, the mid-passage celebration when the rhumbline bends toward Europe. By day fifteen the talk on deck starts to turn to the first landfall, and on day twenty-three the conical peak of Pico rises out of the haze, the highest mountain in Portugal, and the Atlantic gives up its hold on the ship.

The Azores close the leg in green and black, nine volcanic islands moored mid-ocean, covered in hydrangea hedges and pastureland, ringed by cliffs where sperm whales blow a kilometre offshore. Ponta Delgada on São Miguel is the capital: a Portuguese working harbour with a cobbled old town, black-and-white basalt churches, pineapple greenhouses, and the smell of bacalhau frying in every backstreet tasca. Three nights ashore is barely enough, it is the kind of island where you want a week, but the ship is across the Atlantic, the European mainland is the next leg away, and the hardest ocean work of the homecoming is done. Leg 8 is the last real ocean before Europe, and the one that earns the homecoming.