Six weeks down the Antilles. Three cabins are open.

We leave Le Marin on the Saturday and sail overnight to Bequia, which puts the one long passage of the week behind us while you sleep. After that it is short hops.

Mustique, then the Tobago Cays: Horseshoe Reef with nothing behind it but open Atlantic, and green turtles grazing on the inside. That is the best snorkelling of the six weeks, and it needs no certification card. Carriacou, and then down to St George's on the Friday.

Three flags in seven days — France, St Vincent & the Grenadines, Grenada — most of them within sight of the next one.

The way back north is upwind, which is why this week is the one a sailor should take. It is priced below weeks 4 and 5 because it revisits islands week 1 already saw and because Grenada needs a connection; week 6 is cheaper still, for a different reason.

We start at the Molinière sculpture park outside St George's — shallow enough to snorkel — and the Bianca C, a 180 m liner on the seabed for anyone qualified to go down to her. Then up through Union and St Vincent, and an anchorage under the Pitons at Soufrière, where the wall under Petit Piton drops below the water as steeply as the mountain rises above it.

Two hundred and thirty miles, mostly on the wind, in the flat water behind the islands. Grenada's airport needs a connection from Europe, which is the other reason this week is priced below the rest.

The shortest week by distance and the greenest one.

St Pierre under Mont Pelée, then Dominica: the Indian River rowed under overhanging swamp bloodwood roots, and Champagne Reef, where volcanic gas bubbles up through the coral and you swim through a champagne glass. It is snorkellable, which makes it the best site on the whole route for non-divers.

Les Saintes and the Pain de Sucre anchorage, then up Guadeloupe’s west coast to Pointe-à-Pitre, passing the Îlets Pigeon, where the Réserve Cousteau has been protected since 1979.

This week opens on Carnival Saturday. The French Antilles carnival runs for days and peaks on Monday 8 and Tuesday 9 February, ending with the whole island dressed in black and white on Ash Wednesday. It is not a tourist production — it is the biggest thing that happens there all year.

Then Montserrat, and Plymouth buried in ash seen from the water with the volcano behind it. The southern half of the island is still an exclusion zone.

We finish in English Harbour among the Georgian pillars of Nelson's Dockyard, and Nonsuch Bay. A hundred and ten miles is the least sailing of any week on the route, which makes this the easiest week to take if you are not sure about boats. Best for the single most interesting week ashore: if you can only take one, take this one.

Seven regions in seven days, most of them within sight of each other. This is the densest week on the route and the reason the route is shaped the way it is.

Barbuda's pink sand runs to the horizon with nobody on it. Then Nevis and St Kitts, and Statia and Saba: two islands almost nobody dives, standing on seamounts with deep water right up to the rock. Saba is a single volcanic cone with no harbour and no beach, and the diving off it is exceptional.

Gustavia for the evening, and into Sint Maarten. The Northern Leewards give roughly 11.5 stops per 100 nautical miles against 2.0 on the mid-chain and 2.0 in the Windwards.

Week 6 is the passage week, not the sightseeing one. Four hundred miles downwind in the steadiest breeze of the whole six. That is not a consolation prize; it is a different holiday.

First the border into Saint-Martin — two countries on one island, and you can walk across it — and Anguilla at the top of the chain. Then we turn south for 330 nautical miles of open water back to Le Marin.

This is the one genuinely open passage of the six weeks, so if the idea of it worries you, take another week instead. Starlink runs on a lower-priority mode offshore: treat it as email, not calls.