The odds are good that you’ve seen a Spirit Yacht, but it’s likely that it was on the silver screen instead of in a marina. The reason for this is because James Bond’s yacht was a Spirit Yacht in Casino Royale (2006), and it was objectively a perfect choice for the fashionable international man of mystery. The U.K.-based company is known for its gorgeous, traditionally styled and shaped wood yachts with composite hulls. While rare on the West Coast, the appropriately named 50’ Spirit Yachts Deckhouse (2011) Roving Spirit is currently for sale in Santa Barbara.
In Roving Spirit, you have a yacht steeped in another era. The eyes are immediately drawn to the elegant stern overhang, an old-school look that will forever be associated with class. The deep-seated cockpit is sheltered forward with high coamings, a sailor’s cockpit first and foremost. The wooden deckhouse coupled with the real teak deck is almost too gorgeous to sail, an echo of a bygone century when the sun never set on the British Empire.
Design-wise, Roving Spirit features a bulb keel and reportedly tracks like an arrow when on the rails. The accommodations below include two cabins with a total of two double berths and two single berths. A 40-horsepower Yanmar inboard diesel seems a dependable motor pairing for the build. The combination of fiberglass composite hull with wood above water is brilliant, giving the owner the strength, ease of maintenance, and safety of more modern material with all the aesthetic joys of the woodwork.
Whoever owns this yacht is going to turn heads, wherever they go, with one of the yacht-iest yachts that ever yachted. Take those martinis shaken, not stirred.
If interested in this beauty, you can contact the West Coast dealer Seacoast Yachts. Listed at the time of this writing at $895,000.
