Azure 50

The Azure 50 gives seven guests eleven metres of boat, which is the most generous space-per-person ratio among our smaller hulls. Where the Chiara puts eleven people on twelve metres, this one puts seven on eleven, and the difference is felt within about ten minutes of casting off: nobody is ever waiting for a seat, a towel space or a turn on the bathing platform.

She is quick as well as roomy, with 34 knots on her specification and twin petrol engines behind it. Her pricing is also the tidiest on the site: €2,500, €3,000 and €3,500 across the three seasons, moving in exact €500 steps.

How her days usually run

With a small group aboard a fast boat, the day can be as ambitious or as lazy as you want it. Three anchorages is entirely realistic. So is one long stop with a swim at either end. The skipper will read which of those you are within the first half hour and shape the rest accordingly.

Choose a start within the customary late-morning band; her eight hours begin the moment the lines are slipped. Groups of this size board quickly, which in practice buys you an extra fifteen or twenty minutes of water at the far end of the day.

The pattern that comes up most often is a first swim on the west coast, a long midday stop somewhere with a beach worth walking on, and a shorter final anchorage close enough to the marina that nobody has to check a watch on the way back.

Because the group is small, changing the plan mid-charter is a two-sentence conversation rather than a negotiation. That flexibility is one of the underrated arguments for chartering a boat sized close to your actual party rather than one sized for the party you might have had.

The right group for her

Couples travelling in pairs, families of five or six, small groups of friends who would rather have room than the lowest possible per-head number. Seven is the licensed maximum and she carries it comfortably, but she is arguably at her best with five or six aboard.

She also suits a group with a mixed appetite for activity, because there is enough deck for the people who want to sunbathe to be genuinely separate from the people who are getting in and out of the water every ten minutes. On a busier boat those two populations end up in each other’s way.

Above seven guests she stops being the answer, and the licensing behind that appears on our page about guest limits on Spanish charters. Eight or nine guests belong on a different hull, and there are several within a few hundred euros of this one.

What the deck offers

A wide cockpit with seating and a table aft, an unusually large foredeck for a boat of this length, and a swim platform that seven people will never manage to crowd. The helm sits under cover, and the deck around it is wide enough to pass without asking anyone to move.

She belongs to the group carrying the full refreshment list, so chilled water and soft drinks travel with her, along with beer, a little wine and cava, savoury nibbles, fruit and a stand-up paddleboard. Towels and snorkels are standard across every boat we run.

There is no interior plan published for this hull, so read her as an open boat. In practice the only thing that costs you is shade, and a couple of hats and a light cover-up each resolves it entirely.

The coves she is good at

Eleven metres is short enough to tuck into the narrower inlets and long enough to be comfortable when the afternoon breeze fills in. That combination opens up more of the coast than either extreme manages, which is why she ends up on so many different itineraries across a season.

In the busiest fortnight of August her length is a quiet advantage. She can anchor closer to the sand than the twenty-metre boats, which shortens the swim, cuts the tender traffic around you and generally puts you in better water than the money alone would suggest.

Sound travels a long way over flat water. Play what you like when you are on your own, and expect the skipper to ask for less volume when other boats are close by in the afternoon. That is a licensing matter rather than a matter of taste.

Pace, burn and the Formentera run

She will do the crossing without drama. At 34 knots the passage from the south of the island to the sandbanks is short enough that the day still belongs to swimming rather than travelling, and the return leg in the afternoon is well within her comfort.

Consumption is around 95 litres per hour while she is running, and the engines only work for something in the region of 1.5 hours across a typical eight-hour charter. Everything else is spent at anchor with them switched off, which is why the fuel figure rarely lands where people expect.

Fuel is charged after the charter against the amount consumed, and it is the only variable element of the day. If you want to see how that compares with the alternative, our page on taking a private boat instead of the ferry lays the two side by side.

Practical notes

Bring soft bags, because storage is lockers and there is nowhere sensible for a rigid case. Bring shade in some portable form. Do not bring towels; they are already aboard for everyone in the party.

No qualification is required from anybody in your group. The skipper carries the licence and the legal responsibility, and both are inside the published rate. The longer explanation lives on our page about licence rules for boat hire in Ibiza.

Lunch may travel with you, happen on land, or be set up by us in advance. Say which at the time of booking, since a restaurant reservation fixes where the boat needs to be at a given hour and the skipper works the morning around it.

Sunset outings are arranged individually rather than sold as a fixed slot, because the useful departure time shifts substantially between May and October.

Her published seasons

Three bands, all shown above the fold, none of them a starting figure that grows. The low band covers May and October, the middle band June and September, the top band July and August.

Two identical €500 steps make this the easiest boat in the fleet to budget for: every band you shift down is worth the same amount, so a group deciding between the end of August and the middle of September knows exactly what the move is worth. The whole fleet is compared this way on our per-person cost page.

The obvious alternatives

The Aura 44 carries the same seven guests from €2,499 at a far more relaxed pace. The Fjord 50 is the same capacity again with a very different deck, from €3,000. Every one of them is listed on our speedboat charter page.

Questions we hear about her