Lagoon 42

Seven metres seventy of beam on a hull of twelve metres eighty. That is a boat almost two thirds as wide as she is long, and it is the reason a forty-two-foot catamaran can carry eight people for a week without any of them counting the days.

She is available from six bases, which no other boat in the fleet can match: Portorosa and Capo d'Orlando in Sicily, Tropea in Calabria, Salerno in Campania, Cala de' Medici in Tuscany, and Olbia in Sardinia. The boat is the constant and the coast is the variable.

That choice is worth more than it looks. From Portorosa the Aeolian islands are the week; from Tropea it is the Calabrian coast and the same volcanoes from the other side; from Cala de' Medici it is Elba and the Tuscan archipelago. One hull, five very different holidays.

Four double cabins and four bathrooms, one to each. Eight guests, eight places to be, and no shared door in the corridor: on a boat of this length that allocation is the difference between a group that stays comfortable all week and a group that starts negotiating on Tuesday.

She carries a full flybridge, which on twelve metres eighty is generous. It puts the helm and a seating area above the cockpit, so the person steering is still part of the day rather than separated from it, and the shade below stays free for everyone else.

Draught is a metre twenty-five, the shallowest in this part of the fleet. It decides where the anchor goes down at every single stop, and over seven days that adds up to a different holiday from the one a deeper boat gives you on the same coast.

She dates from 2019, so she belongs to the generation of the 42 that had the layout settled and the details worked out. Nothing aboard is a first attempt, and on a boat that runs charter after charter through the summer that matters more than novelty.

There is no permanent crew: bareboat with the right qualification, or with a skipper arranged in advance who reads the forecast and picks the anchorage. On six coasts with six different weather patterns, that second option is worth considering seriously.