A week’s yacht charter, Sardinia or the Amalfi Coast

A week aboard a chartered yacht rearranges time before it rearranges geography. You wake at anchor in a cove you reached the evening before, swim from the transom before breakfast, and let the day's plan follow the wind and the forecast rather than a printed itinerary. Along the Costa Smeralda and the Maddalena archipelago in northern Sardinia, that means water the colour of cut glass over white sand, and islands — Spargi, Budelli, Santa Maria — where the anchorages are protected and the going gentle. The Amalfi alternative trades Sardinia's low granite islands for a vertical coast: Positano stacked up its cliff, the fishing harbour of Cetara, the long grey wall of the peninsula falling straight into deep water. Here the sailing is shorter and the shore excursions richer, with Capri and the Li Galli islets within an easy morning's passage. Most families take the boat with a skipper, and often a cook, which removes every technical worry and leaves you to the part that matters: the cove before the crowds arrive, the long lunch at anchor, the walk ashore for an ice cream and back aboard by tender. A modern monohull of forty to fifty feet sleeps a family comfortably across three or four cabins, and the skipper handles the marina, the weather and the anchoring while you do very little but be present. It is the most forgiving door onto the water, which is at once its value and its limit. Nothing here demands seamanship or nerve; the comfort travels with you, and the coast is well charted and busy in high summer. But for a family testing whether a life afloat suits them — and for the child who learns to snorkel off the swim ladder and never quite forgets it — a week like this is hard to better.