Leg 9 is the homecoming. Four hundred and eighty-two days after the ship cast off in Bali, and 18,844 nautical miles later, two oceans, three equator crossings, Cape Agulhas in a blow, the long South Atlantic reach to Recife, the Caribbean, the Gulf Stream, and the mid-Atlantic stepping-stones of the Azores, NEPTUN points her bows one last time at Europe. She sails from Ponta Delgada on a high-summer morning, volcanic São Miguel falling away astern in a haze of hydrangea green and black cliffs, and puts twelve hundred miles of North Atlantic between herself and her last foreign port.

The first leg of the homecoming is a classic Biscay-approach passage: fifteen sail days of prevailing westerlies, the water growing cooler and greener by the degree, the swell shortening as the continental shelf shoals under the keel. Landfall is in the Channel Islands, Guernsey and the granite coast of Brittany, where fresh pain au chocolat, Norman butter and the first genuine European café in nearly a year and a half wait on the quay. Five prep days here are spent scrubbing salt from the rig, servicing the engine for the canal transit, and briefing the crew on the seamanship that comes next: not ocean sailing but shipping-lane navigation, the trickiest water on the whole voyage.

From Guernsey the ship motors, there is no romantic way around it, 621 nm through some of the busiest water on earth. The English Channel narrows to the Dover Strait and its Traffic Separation Scheme, where four hundred ships a day thread their way between Calais and Dover in two strict lanes and a central no-go zone. Crossing perpendicular under power at four and a half knots, with every ferry and container vessel logged on AIS and the VHF alive in three languages, is the seamanship detail that makes it real: this is not a holiday, it is the last piece of working ocean. Out into the southern North Sea, past Dutch gas platforms and wind farms, NEPTUN raises Helgoland, the tiny German island of red sandstone cliffs, a British pilot station turned duty-free outpost, and the last solid land before the Elbe. Six nights here to walk the Oberland, taste a schnapps and watch the gannets. Then the Elbe estuary, the lock gates at Brunsbüttel, and the long quiet miles of the Kiel Canal ghosting past wheat fields and cows, the strangest transit on the voyage, a big sailing ship in an inland waterway, the Nord-Ostsee-Kanal lifting the hull from the North Sea to the Baltic.

The gates at Holtenau open, the Baltic spreads out blue and freshwater-clear, and the Kieler Förde rolls out to welcome her home. Kieler Woche has packed up for the year but the tall-ship culture never leaves this harbour, sail training ships, classic yachts, the Gorch Fock at her berth, and a whole summer city that knows what a brigantine is on sight. Family and friends line the quay. The logbook closes. Four hundred and eighty-two days, eighteen thousand eight hundred and forty-four miles, nine legs, two oceans. The ship is home.