Sanctuary

Forty-three metres is a deliberate size and this yacht is the argument for it. She is large enough to carry ten guests, seven crew and a proper beach club, and small enough to take a berth in harbours that turn away everything above forty-five.

That distinction is not theoretical in the eastern Mediterranean. The old harbours of the Dodecanese and the Turkish coast were not built for modern yachts, and the difference between lying alongside in the town and anchoring outside it is the difference between walking to dinner and running a tender service all evening.

Ten guests across five cabins, two to a room, with nothing folded down to make the numbers work. Five couples, or a family travelling in pairs, fit the layout as it was drawn. Nobody is allocated the cabin that exists to make the brochure say twelve.

Seven crew for ten guests. On a yacht of this length that is a full complement rather than a minimum one, and it is what allows the tenders, the meals and the cabins to be running at the same time instead of in sequence through a busy afternoon.

The swim platform is wide and the beach club behind it is genuine. It is the part of a yacht in the Aegean that gets used from breakfast until the light goes, and its size decides whether swimming is a thing you organise or a thing you simply do whenever the yacht stops.

She was delivered by Overmarine in 2016, which puts her in the generation where the yard had settled the type. A decade of seasons behind her means the systems are proven, the crew know her behaviour, and nothing aboard is still waiting to be discovered.

The cruising ground is the eastern Mediterranean, which is the one that rewards this size most. Anchorages outnumber marinas, distances between islands are short, and a yacht that can go alongside in a small port has a genuinely different holiday from one that cannot.

Choose her for the itinerary rather than for the specification. If the week is the Aegean, the Turkish bays or the Dodecanese, forty-three metres with seven crew is close to the ideal instrument, and the extra five metres a larger yacht offers would cost you harbours.