Lagoon 52 F

Twelve guests on a hull of fifteen metres eighty-five is a high number, and the beam is what makes it work: eight metres sixty across, so the accommodation sits in the two hulls and the living space sits on the bridge between them rather than being carved out of one.

Six cabins and five bathrooms. That is one short of a bathroom each, and it is worth knowing before you divide the boat up: five of the six have their own, and one pair shares. Families settle that in a minute; six unrelated couples should decide it in advance.

The flybridge is a full one, with a bar on it. It is the part of the boat that gets used from mid-morning until the light goes: the highest deck, the best view over the anchorage, and drinks that do not have to be carried up from the galley below.

The bathing platform is hydraulic. It lowers to the water and brings the sea up to deck height instead of leaving a ladder to negotiate, which matters most to the people who use it most often: children going in and out all afternoon, and anyone who is not twenty-five.

A crew of two runs her, and at this size that is the arrangement that works: a skipper who reads the weather and picks the anchorage, and a second pair of hands for the galley and the day. Twelve guests aboard, and nobody in the party has a job.

She dates from 2021, so the systems, the sails and the fit-out have four or five Mediterranean summers behind them rather than fifteen. On a boat that turns around between charters all season, that is a more honest guide to the week ahead than the model name.

Draught is a metre and a half. It puts her inside the bays instead of anchoring off them, and on a coast of small harbours it decides how many of the places on the chart are available to you over a week rather than how many you sail past.

Two bases: Capo d'Orlando on the north coast of Sicily, and Olbia in north-east Sardinia. One opens the Aeolian islands, the other the Costa Smeralda and the Maddalena. Choose the base and you have chosen the week, before anything else is decided.