Bali 4.2

A beam of 7.08 metres on a hull of 12.85 is the number that explains the rest. Her width is more than half her length, and everything people notice aboard comes back to that proportion: the space, the steadiness, the way eight can sit down without negotiating for room.

The aft door tilts up rather than sliding across, so the saloon and the cockpit become a single room with a roof over part of it. Meals move outside without anything being moved, and the boundary most boats defend between inside and out is simply not there.

Forward, the deck is solid rather than trampolined. Where other catamarans have netting there is a terrace: a flat surface for the morning sun, for the hour after dinner, and for anyone who wants to be at the far end of the boat from everybody else.

Four double cabins and four heads means one bathroom to each cabin, and that is the detail which decides whether eight people enjoy the week or count it. Nothing is shared along the corridor, and the mornings run through without anyone waiting their turn.

A draught of 1.25 metres is shallow for eight berths. It lets her tuck into bays where deeper boats stay out near the entrance, and it puts the anchor closer in, which shortens the swim to the beach at every stop along the coast.

She dates from 2022, so the systems and the fit-out are recent rather than inherited from a decade of earlier seasons. On a boat that works right through a Mediterranean summer, and turns around between one charter and the next, that counts for more than any single line on the specification sheet.

There is no permanent crew. She can be taken bareboat by anyone qualified to handle her, or with a skipper arranged in advance: the difference between a holiday you run yourselves and one where somebody else reads the forecast and picks the anchorage for the night.

The base is Salerno, on the Gulf of Salerno in Campania, and boarding from the marina there is the simplest way onto the Amalfi Coast. You start where the coast starts, rather than spending the first day of the week travelling to reach the beginning of it.