North Wind

A sailing yacht of forty-four metres working the Greek islands. That combination is rarer than it sounds: most yachts chartering in the Aegean are motor yachts, and a hull of this length under sail uses the same water in an entirely different way.

The Aegean is a sailing ground before it is anything else. The meltemi is reliable through the summer, the distances between islands are the right length for a day's passage, and a yacht that can use the wind rather than motor through it is doing what the geography was made for.

Ten guests across five cabins, two to a room, dividing evenly with nothing folded down. Five couples fit the layout as drawn, and so does a family travelling in pairs. Nobody arrives to find they have been given the room that makes up the numbers.

Eight crew for ten guests. On a sailing yacht of this size that number does double work: it takes real hands to sail forty-four metres properly, and the service has to hold at the same standard while the yacht is heeled and moving.

The cockpit is vast and shaded, and on a sailing yacht it is the main room. Everything happens there: meals, the afternoon, the hours between anchorages. Its size and its shade together determine what a fortnight aboard actually feels like far more than the saloon below.

Forward there are sunpads, which is a different place at a different hour. They face the way the yacht is sailing and they are out of the wind that funnels through the cockpit at anchor, so they fill up when the aft deck empties.

The swim platform is loaded with toys. On a yacht that sails, the stops matter more than on one that motors: you arrive having done something, and the anchorage is the reward rather than simply the next parking place along the coast.

She was delivered in 2016 and works Greece and the Aegean, which is where a yacht of this type belongs rather than where she happens to be. Take her if you want the passages to be the point of the fortnight. Ten people, eight crew, forty-four metres of sail, and a sea that has been used this way for three thousand years.