Mimay

Mimay is a schooner, rebuilt over three years from the frames up, and both halves of that sentence matter. The shape is the old one — two masts, a long bowsprit, twenty-four metres ninety overall and twenty-one metres thirty on the hull — while almost everything inside it is new.

Five metres seventy of beam and fifty-five tonnes of displacement. Those are the figures behind the way she behaves at anchor: a heavy wooden vessel does not move the way a light modern one does, and the difference is felt at dinner rather than under way.

Three double cabins, each with its own bathroom, for six guests. The interior was drawn to remove corridors rather than to add berths, so the cabins are rooms rather than compartments, and they sit apart from one another instead of along a passage.

They carry names rather than numbers. Betsy is the owner's cabin, Ada the central one, Cleo the double. Wood, brass, period furniture and salvaged materials run through all three, which is what three years of rebuilding actually buys you.

Four crew look after those six guests: captain, chef, hostess and deckhand. That ratio, rather than the length, is what decides the shape of a week aboard. She is chartered privately, to one party at a time, in weeks of seven nights, boarding and leaving at the same quay.

The food is settled before you board. Guests agree the week with the chef in advance — how many meals aboard, which dishes, which wines — so the provisioning follows the group rather than a standard formula, and dinner ashore stays a choice rather than a fallback.

Her deck is teak, laid out as separate areas rather than one cockpit, with gratings underfoot and solar panels set into the panelling. She draws two metres ten, modest for a vessel of twenty-five metres, and that figure decides how many Aeolian bays are open to her.

She works from Marina di Capo d'Orlando on the north coast of Sicily, and the archipelago is the whole point of her: Stromboli, Panarea, Salina, Lipari, Filicudi. Her specification also lists twelve guests on charter — a daytime figure. Three double cabins sleep six.