Lagoon 55

Seventeen metres, five cabins, eight guests, five heads, and a crew of three. Read those numbers together and the Lagoon 55 stops looking like a bigger version of the 46 and starts looking like a different kind of holiday altogether.

Five cabins for eight guests is the unusual part. Most boats fill every cabin to capacity; this one does not have to. Four guest suites carry the party, and the fifth room absorbs whatever a real week actually contains — the friend joining late, the teenager who wants a door, the grandparent who does not want to climb into a forepeak.

The crew of three is what changes the register. Nobody plans the route at breakfast, nobody shops, nobody cooks, nobody washes up at eleven at night. On a fourteen-metre boat those jobs are part of the experience and some people want them. At seventeen metres with a crew aboard, they simply disappear, and the week becomes something you are hosted through rather than something you organise.

Her beam is nine point five five metres — more than half her length. That is the number behind the phrase people use about catamarans without examining it: the saloon is not a corridor, the cockpit is not a bench, and eight people can be in different places without anyone feeling crowded.

There are three of those places, which matters more than their size. The aft cockpit runs straight off the saloon with no threshold between them. The forward lounge faces the other way, into the wind, and is where the boat is quietest. The flybridge is above both, and the sails are worked from it, so the sailing happens over your head rather than through the middle of the party.

She draws one and a half metres, delivered in 2023, and lies at Capo d'Orlando, Salerno and Olbia. That puts the Aeolian Islands, the Amalfi Coast and the Maddalena archipelago each within a week's reach of a different starting point.

Five heads for five cabins decides how the mornings go. Nobody waits, nobody carries a wash bag along a corridor, and two families sharing a week never have to coordinate.

She suits people who want to be aboard rather than in charge — who would rather spend the week deciding where to swim than deciding what to cook.