Lagoon 51

The 51 is the newest of the twelve-guest catamarans here, delivered in 2023, and it is the one that reorganised the deck rather than simply enlarging it. What changes is not the amount of space but how many different things the same space is asked to do in a day.

The lounging areas convert. Seating becomes a sun bed, a dining table drops to a low one, and the cockpit that held twelve for lunch holds four for the evening. It sounds like a detail until you spend a week aboard and notice you have never moved to change what you are doing.

There is a second cockpit forward, ahead of the saloon, with its own sun deck. It faces the direction the boat is going and it is out of the wind that funnels aft at anchor: two reasons it is occupied at hours of the day when the aft deck is empty.

Six cabins for twelve guests, with five bathrooms between them. Five cabins have their own and one pair shares, which is the kind of thing better settled at a table before departure than in a corridor at eight in the morning on the second day.

A crew of two: a skipper, and a second who takes the galley and the day. Fifteen metres is the size at which a boat still handles like a boat and already needs somebody whose whole week is running it, which is exactly what this arrangement provides.

Beam is eight metres ten on a length of fifteen thirty-five. The proportion is why twelve people fit without the boat feeling like a dormitory: the width carries the accommodation, so the deck is left as deck rather than being built over.

Draught is a metre fifty-five, shallow enough to take her in where the water shelves and the monohulls hold off. Over a week that is not one dramatic anchorage but a dozen ordinary ones, each of them fifty metres closer to the beach than it would otherwise have been.

She works from three bases: Capo d'Orlando for the Aeolian islands, Salerno for the Amalfi Coast, Olbia for Sardinia. It is the widest choice of starting point of any boat in the fleet, and it is the decision worth making first.