Lagoon 46

The Lagoon 46 is the boat most weeks in this fleet actually get booked on, and the reason is arithmetic rather than glamour. Fourteen metres, four cabins, eight guests, four heads. Nothing about that is extravagant, and everything about it works.

Her beam is seven point nine six metres on a hull of thirteen point nine nine. The two numbers are within four centimetres of a perfect four-to-seven ratio, which in practice means a boat that measures fourteen metres and lives like something considerably larger. The saloon runs the full width between the hulls. The cockpit behind it is not a separate room but a continuation of the same floor.

Four double cabins, four heads: one bathroom each, no sharing, no negotiation on the first evening about who gets what. Eight guests is two families, or four couples, and the layout does not favour any of them over the others — a genuinely neutral boat, which sounds dull until you have spent a week on one that wasn't.

The flybridge is raised and the sails are handled from it. That places whoever is steering above the saloon roof with a clear view forward, and it keeps the working end of the boat away from the seating. Guests are not asked to move every time a sheet is trimmed.

She draws one point three five metres. On the Aeolian coast and around the Costa Smeralda that is the number that decides where a week is spent: the shallow, sand-bottomed bays that a keelboat has to admire from outside are simply available.

Delivered in 2021, she carries no permanent crew and can be taken with a skipper on request. That is the other reason she is booked so often — the same boat serves a family that wants to sail it themselves and one that would rather not, without becoming a different proposition.

The cockpit-to-saloon flow is worth stating plainly, because it is the thing guests notice on the second morning rather than the first. There is no threshold, no step, no door to shut against the weather. Breakfast starts inside and finishes outside without anyone deciding to move it.

She lies at Portorosa, Capo d'Orlando, Salerno and Olbia, which is four starting points across two seas. Few boats in this collection are that portable, and none of the larger ones are.