PERPETUAL BLUE Yacht Charter — 18m Fountaine Pajot sailing catamaran for 10 guests, with a crew of 2

On Deck

Boarding Perpetual Blue through one of its open transoms, one is instantly struck by the spaciousness and elegance of the aft deck area. The boat’s tender is tucked neatly under a large open sun deck that protrudes from the stern and thus is barely noticeable. The expansive teak-decked lounging area forward of the sun deck is sheltered by a hardtop targa roof and features a long L-shaped settee, an open dining table with chairs and a nifty wet bar with a sink and a small fridge. No rigging or working lines intrude on this space, so that its social function is sacrosanct.

Take four short steps up an open stairway just left of the wet bar and you arrive at the boat’s nerve center. Here you find a low-profile helm station with well-situated instrument displays set behind a bank of three winches. All working lines are led here, save for the headsail’s furling line, which is still easily accessible, just a step to the right on the starboard rail. Better yet, all line runs are clean and efficient, without lots of friction-inducing twists and turns, and there’s plenty of space for dealing with line tails. There’s a nice rail on which to hang coils, a large line bag, plus a convenient belowdecks line locker. If you’re sailing the boat hard and want to keep active lines ready to run, you can always just toss them down the stairway to your left and let them splay about the aft deck a bit.

Left of the helm is another social zone atop the targa roof, where guests can lounge on a low settee or sunbathe on a banquette while chatting with the working crew. The clearance for the main boom directly overhead is carefully calculated so that there’s enough room to keep guests from feeling cramped), but not so much that it isn’t within easy reach of the crew when tending the mainsail.

The interior living spaces are, in a word, palatial. The saloon on our test boat featured an enormous settee and low-set coffee table to port (a dedicated dining table can also be specified) and a fantastic galley to starboard. Forward there was an elegant nav station to port, with a pop-up console to house a chartplotter and other electronics, and an entertainment center, with a large retractable flat-screen TV, to starboard.

Most notable in the galley were the huge American-sized double-door fridge (complete with automatic water and ice dispensers in the freezer door), the large twin sinks and a full-size dishwasher. I found oodles of working counter space here and a dedicated space for a microwave oven, but I was a little surprised to see that storage was a bit tight. There is no obvious secure space in which to store glasses, and there are no raised lockers.

The sleeping quarters down in the two hulls seem to go on forever. Our boat featured the charter layout, with three staterooms in each hull (the center stateroom to starboard is somewhat smaller, and is tagged as a skipper’s space), plus some vestigial crew quarters up in the two forepeaks. A five-stateroom layout, with an enormous owner’s cabin to port, is also available. All staterooms have en suite heads with separate showers, save the skipper’s quarters, which lacks only the separate shower space. The cabins on both sides are accessible through twin companionways, so no one need traipse through someone else’s bedroom to get to theirs.

Finish quality throughout the interior was excellent for a mass-production boat. Everywhere you look you see hardwood parquet or veneers, leather and fabric, with no exposed fiberglass surfaces anywhere, except in the heads.