Karibu

An Oyster 825 of twenty-seven metres one, which is to say a yacht built to cross oceans being used in the Mediterranean. Oyster build bluewater cruisers: hulls designed for the Atlantic and the Pacific, sailed by owners who intend to be a long way from help.

That provenance is the whole reason to choose her. A yacht engineered for a trade-wind crossing treats a Mediterranean summer as an easy season, and the margin built into the rig, the systems and the hull is margin you get to enjoy rather than margin you need.

She genuinely sails. That should not be a distinguishing feature and it is: a great many charter sailing yachts spend the week motoring between anchorages, and this one is built, rigged and crewed to use the wind when it is there.

Eight guests across four cabins, two to a room, dividing evenly with nothing folded down. Four couples fit as drawn, and so does a family travelling in pairs. On a twenty-seven-metre sailing yacht that is a generous allocation rather than a full one.

Four crew for eight guests. It is the right scale for a yacht of this type: enough hands to sail her properly and to cook and look after the day, small enough that the boat stays a boat rather than becoming a floating hotel with sails on it.

The cockpit is deep and sheltered, which is what a bluewater design gives you: a place to sit that is protected when the yacht is heeled and moving, rather than a lounge that only works at anchor in flat water.

Forward there are sunpads, and on a sailing yacht that is the other place to be: facing the way she is going, out of the wind that funnels aft, and occupied at the hours when the cockpit is in the sun rather than the shade.

She dates from 2013 and works the western Mediterranean, where a yacht built for the Atlantic has an easy time of it. Take her if the eight of you want the sailing to be real rather than decorative. There are more comfortable yachts of this length in the fleet, and there is not one of them that would get you across an ocean.