Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 490

Fourteen metres seventy-nine of hull, four metres forty-nine of beam and a keel two metres twenty-seven down. Read those three numbers together and you have the boat: narrow, deep and balanced, built to sail rather than to provide the largest possible interior for the length.

The design won its awards for the walkaround deck. The side decks slope down from the cockpit to the bow in a single continuous surface, so going forward is walking rather than climbing, and the guests who normally stay aft on a sailing yacht do not stay aft on this one.

Five cabins and three bathrooms for ten guests. That is the honest count and it needs saying before the cabins are allocated: two of the five cabins share, and the group that sorts this out at home has a better week than the group that discovers it on the second morning.

Twin helms sit either side of the cockpit. Whoever is steering sits to windward, sees the headsail and the bow without standing, and leaves the cockpit between the wheels clear for the eight or nine people who are doing nothing more strenuous than reading.

She dates from 2019, recent enough that the rig, the electronics and the interior are current rather than inherited from an older generation. On a boat that works right through the season, that is a more useful thing to know than the length or the name of the model.

The keel means she anchors where there is water. Two metres twenty-seven takes her further from the beach than a catamaran and gives back the thing a catamaran cannot: a hull that holds its course, drives to windward and behaves properly when the sea gets up in the afternoon.

There is no permanent crew. Bareboat with the right ticket, or with a skipper booked ahead, and on this coast that second option earns its keep: the north of Sicily has its own wind pattern, and knowing it changes where you sleep each night.

Capo d'Orlando is the base, on the Sicilian north coast facing the Aeolians. Vulcano, Lipari and Salina are all within a day, the crossings are open enough to be real sailing, and the archipelago sits comfortably inside one week.