High summer on the Riviera is one week; September is another, quieter one.

Balthazar Yachting, a French private yachting house headquartered in Dubai with a presence in Monaco, explains how a September charter from the Riviera to Sardinia is put together, and why every day is a decision.

In September the Riviera changes tempo. The high-summer crowds have thinned, the water still holds the summer’s warmth, the light has turned gold, and a yacht leaving Port Hercule at nine in the morning can have the bay of Villefranche almost to itself by ten. July and August have the energy of the season, the full beaches and the crowded evenings, and many clients would not trade them. September is for a different brief: the same coast, with the volume turned down. September has its own calendar: the Cannes show early in the month, the regattas at Porto Cervo, the Monaco Yacht Show at its end. The good weeks are the ones the calendar leaves alone.

What follows is the shape of such a week, from Monaco to Porto Cervo, as a house would build it for a party of eight on a motor yacht. Not a fixed itinerary, because a good week is never fixed and the captain has the last word on the weather, but the logic behind one.

Day one: Monaco to Cap Ferrat, and the art of leaving late

The temptation on day one is to leave early and cover distance. The better decision is the opposite. Guests arrive from three airports and two time zones; the yacht sits alongside in Monaco while they find their cabins, meet the crew and eat lunch on deck with the Rock behind them. Departure is at four. An hour later the anchor goes down off the eastern shore of Cap Ferrat, in water clear enough to count the stones, for a first swim and a first sunset. Nothing has been achieved and everything has begun.

Day two: Antibes and the Lérins Islands

A morning passage west, past Nice and the airport approach, to the Cap d’Antibes, where the captain anchors on whichever side of the cape the wind has left calm. Lunch is a tender ride to the Lérins Islands, where Sainte-Marguerite’s pine woods come down to the water and the anchorage between the two islands fills with local boats by noon and empties by five. The yacht follows in the afternoon and stays the night at the islands, with the lights of Cannes across the bay.

Day three: Saint-Tropez, on your own terms

Saint-Tropez in September is the town of the postcards at a gentler pace than in July. The advisor’s rule is simple: anchor off Pampelonne in the morning, lunch on the beach at a table reserved weeks ahead, then move the yacht round to the gulf for the evening, where the lights of the village come on across the water and the tender can run guests in for a late drink. Berthing in the old port is possible and, in September, sometimes even sensible, but the anchorage keeps the week’s rhythm.

Day four: the crossing to Corsica

This is the day the week changes character. The yacht leaves Saint-Tropez before dawn for the passage to Corsica, six to eight hours depending on the yacht and the sea. Guests wake at sea, which is a pleasure most people have never had. By mid- afternoon the citadel of Calvi rises out of the haze, and the yacht anchors in the bay beneath it, in a landscape that has nothing to do with the coast it left that morning. Dinner is on deck, with the mountains going violet behind the town.

Day five: down the west coast to Bonifacio

The longest day of the week: south along Corsica’s wildest coast, past the Scandola reserve, where the red cliffs are best seen from the tender, and on to the Gulf of Porto for lunch at anchor. The afternoon run brings the yacht to Bonifacio, a town built on top of a white limestone cliff above a fjord-like harbour. The yacht enters the harbour in the evening light, which is the way to enter Bonifacio, and stays alongside so guests can walk up to the citadel after dinner.

Day six: the Strait and the Maddalena

The Strait of Bonifacio is crossed in an hour. On the other side, the Maddalena archipelago is a scatter of pink granite islands and shallow turquoise channels that look Caribbean and are Italian. The yacht anchors in one of the coves the park allows, off Spargi or Santa Maria, and the day is spent in the water. This is the day the advisor protects from any plan at all.

Day seven: Porto Cervo

The last day is a short run to Porto Cervo, the harbour the Aga Khan built in the 1960s. The yacht berths; the guests have a final lunch by the marina and a last night alongside, and the next morning the cars are waiting for Olbia airport, about forty minutes away. Seven days, three countries, one sea.

Why September, and why this route

The order matters. The Riviera first, while guests settle; the crossing in the middle, when they are ready for a day at sea; Sardinia last, when the water is the point. Reversed, it would be a different week. The Riviera days alone can fill a week on their own terms, and the variations are set out in Balthazar Yachting’s guide to French Riviera yacht charter itineraries.

The month shapes the week. In the weeks the calendar leaves alone, the anchorages are calmer, and lunches ashore unfold at a gentler pace. In July and August the same route is a different, livelier week, and the advisor builds it differently: more time in the harbours, fewer long passages, the evenings ashore at the centre of the plan. The week above is the kind of programme Balthazar Yachting builds across the whole basin, and the regions are set out, one by one, across its Mediterranean yacht charter destinations.

The route is three thousand years old. The week on it is new every time. Ceban Hammoumraoui, founder of Balthazar Yachting, says with a smile: “The Mediterranean gives you the same water it gave Ulysses. What has changed is the quality of the decisions made around it.”