Lagoon 450 F

The 450 is the boat that made the flybridge catamaran ordinary. Before it, a raised second deck on a cruising cat was unusual; after it, everyone expected one. This is a 2018 example of that layout, and the years since have proved the arrangement rather than dated it.

The flybridge is the reason she works for eight people. It gives the boat a second outdoor room, above the cockpit and away from it, so a group of eight can be in two places at once without anybody feeling sent away from the main one.

Seven metres eighty-seven of beam on a hull of thirteen ninety-six is a wide platform. Wide enough that she barely reacts to somebody walking across her, which is what people mean when they call a catamaran stable and what makes the difference to anyone who does not love boats.

Four double cabins and four bathrooms. One each, nothing shared, no cabin that somebody has to be talked into taking. For a party of eight that single fact settles more arguments in advance than any amount of square metres in the saloon.

She has no permanent crew. Take her bareboat if you hold the qualification, or with a skipper arranged beforehand: the boat is the same either way, and the difference is whether the weather and the choice of bay for the night are your responsibility or somebody else's.

Draught is a metre thirty. It is the number that keeps her close to the shore, and on a week around Sardinia it means anchoring inside the bays where the sand shows through the water rather than out beyond them with the deeper boats.

The base is Olbia, on the north-east coast. The Costa Smeralda begins within an hour of leaving, the Maddalena archipelago is a morning away, and Corsica is close enough to be a genuine option rather than a line on a brochure.

She is the least fashionable boat in this part of the fleet and one of the most sensible. Nothing aboard is experimental, everything has been used by hundreds of crews before you, and that is precisely the argument for taking her rather than something newer that still has its first season to get through.