Aqua Libra

Forty metres of Sunseeker with a dark hull. The colour is the first thing anybody notices and it is worth a sentence: a dark hull reads as smaller and lower than a white one of the same length, which is why yachts that want to look fast are painted this way and yachts that want to look large are not.

Eleven guests across five cabins. Eleven is an odd number, so the cabins do not divide into it evenly, and she suits a family with children or a group in which one person travels alone rather than five couples each expecting a matching room.

Eight crew for eleven guests. At forty metres that is a generous complement, close to one crew member for every guest, and it is the number that determines the texture of a week far more reliably than the length or the name of the yard.

The sundeck carries a bar and generous shaded seating. Both halves of that matter: the bar is where the evening starts, and the shade is what makes the deck usable in the middle of an August afternoon rather than only after five o'clock.

The bathing platform is wide. It is the most used part of any yacht in the Mediterranean summer and the least discussed, and its size decides whether getting into the sea is something you do casually several times a day or something that has to be arranged.

Sunseeker build a specific kind of yacht: fast lines, a strong deck plan, and interiors laid out for people who intend to use the boat rather than admire it. At forty metres those priorities produce a yacht that works hard through a season and looks the part while doing it.

She is available across the Mediterranean rather than tied to one coast. It suits her: this is a yacht that photographs well in the places people want to be photographed, and the freedom to pick the coast late is part of what a group of eleven is buying.

Choose her if the week is social. She is arranged for a group that will be on deck rather than below, in the evening as much as the afternoon, and the dark hull is the honest signal of what she was built to do.