A marina is a village of strangers living closer than neighbours, and its etiquette is the village's civic law: brief, practical and enforced by reputation rather than patrol. For guests it compresses to a handful of rules — arriving slowly, dressing the boat properly, keeping the hours, and letting the crew work the wall. Here they are, with the reasoning that makes them easy to remember.
This is general etiquette as practised across the Mediterranean's marinas; individual harbours and the crew's instructions always govern.
Arriving: the slow theatre
The approach is conducted at walking pace with the crew already staged — fenders down, lines made ready at the bow and stern before the wall is near, because the thirty seconds a line takes to find and cleat is the thirty seconds the boat drifts onto the neighbour. The skipper's briefing on the berth (which side, bow-to or stern-to, wind's plan) happens before the last hundred metres. Guests' role in the manoeuvre: seated, clear of the deck work, hatches closed, phones down. The applause, if any, waits until the lines are fast.
On the wall: the small civilities
Cross nobody's boat without asking — the passerelle-to-pontoon route is the only route, and 'may I cross?' is the marina's most-spoken sentence. Shoes: deck shoes or barefoot aboard, and the same discipline in reverse — street shoes off at the passerelle, because the deck keeps its colour the way the cabin keeps its quiet. Shore power connects through the yacht's proper system, cables dressed, not draped. Water and power on the pontoon are shared infrastructure; the hose coiled, the tap off. And the rubbish: marinas have rules and schedules — the crew knows them, and it isn't a guest job anyway.
The hours
Quiet by ten or eleven, by convention and increasingly by ordinance: music off or down to conversation level, deck conversations moved inboard, the aft deck party wound toward the cabin or the town. Sound on the water carries three boats further than it does ashore, and the wall's acoustics turn one yacht's evening into everyone's. Mornings run the other courtesy: generators and anchor windlasses at seven are legal and still rude, and crews that can delay them do. The mutual bargain — your midnight is someone's seven a.m. — is the whole system in one sentence.
The departures and the dockhands
Leaving is the arrival reversed: slow, staged early, lines off in the order the skipper wants them off. The dockhands who took your lines and showed you the power box work for the marina and live partly on the small gratuity that the region's custom offers — the crew handles it, but a guest who understands the transaction understands the marina. And the last rule is the one that covers everything the list missed: when in doubt, ask the crew. The etiquette exists so that a thousand boats can share a kilometre of wall without a single quarrel, and its secret is simply that everybody follows it.