Lagoon 400

Seven metres twenty-five of beam on a hull of eleven metres ninety-seven. She is wider relative to her length than almost anything else afloat, and that proportion is not a styling choice: it is the reason four cabins and eight people fit into a boat of under twelve metres.

The stability follows from the same number. She does not roll at anchor and she does not lean under sail the way a monohull does, which for anyone in the party who is uncertain about boats is the difference between a week enjoyed and a week endured.

The cockpit is properly protected, roofed and enclosed on three sides. That matters more in practice than it sounds: it is where meals happen, where people sit out a squall, and where the shade is at two in the afternoon when the deck itself is too hot to walk on barefoot.

Four double cabins and four bathrooms. One to each, nothing shared down a corridor, and no cabin that has to be handed to whoever objects least. On a boat this size that allocation is the whole of the comfort argument, and it is settled before you arrive.

Draught is a metre thirty. It is what lets her anchor inside the bays rather than off the entrance to them, and around the Aeolian islands, where the bottom shelves quickly and the good spots are small, that number decides most of the itinerary.

She dates from 2016, from the generation that put the 400 into every charter fleet in the Mediterranean. She is not the newest boat here and she is one of the best understood: every system aboard has been used, repaired and refined across many seasons of hard summer work.

There is no permanent crew. Bareboat for anyone with the qualification, or with a skipper arranged in advance who reads the forecast, chooses the anchorage and knows which side of Salina to be on when the wind turns during the night.

Portorosa is the base, on the north coast of Sicily in the Gulf of Patti. Vulcano and Lipari are a few hours out, Panarea and Stromboli sit further north, and the whole archipelago is comfortably inside a week from that one starting point.