Lagoon 60

Eighteen metres of hull carrying a beam of nine metres eighty-five. That ratio is the whole argument for this boat: more than half her length again in width, which is why the deck feels like a floor rather than a passage and why ten people spread out instead of queueing.

She is a 2026 boat, the newest of the large Lagoons, and the glazing shows it. The saloon is wrapped from floor to ceiling in glass, so the view at anchor is not framed by a window but simply there, on three sides, from wherever you happen to sit.

Five cabins for ten guests and five bathrooms to go with them. Every cabin has its own, nothing runs along a shared corridor, and the arithmetic that decides whether a week feels generous or merely full is settled before anyone comes aboard, rather than discovered on the first morning when four people want the same door at once.

One of the two hulls is given over to the owner's accommodation as a single retreat rather than divided into further berths. It is the choice a builder makes when the brief is space for a family, not the largest number of heads the licence allows.

A crew of three comes with her. That is one crew member for every three or four guests on a boat of eighteen metres, which means the cooking, the tenders and the anchoring are somebody else's problem for the whole week.

The flybridge and the sun deck run to a genuine second storey of outdoor living: helm, shade and seating above, with the cockpit and the foredeck still available below. On a hot afternoon a group naturally splits across those levels instead of competing for one.

Draught is a metre fifty-five. It is shallow for a boat with ten berths, and it decides where the anchor goes down: inside the bay rather than out near the entrance, close enough that the swim to the beach is short at every stop.

Olbia is the base, on the north-east corner of Sardinia, which puts the Costa Smeralda and the Maddalena archipelago within the first morning. You start the week where the good water starts, instead of spending a day getting to it.