SINGLE SHOT
In tourist board iconography, autumn in England is always a child in red wellies kicking neat piles of golden leaves on a perfectly still, sunny day in a forest. The reality, driving to the Suffolk coast this late October, was a steady drizzle running like grapeshot before a keening wind under complete cloud cover. At Levington, where the first Spirit 30 awaited us for a test sail, the wind was blowing well over 20 knots – and that was in the marina.
Those of a delicate disposition might hesitate to call a quick test sail a ‘world first’ or an ‘exclusive’: these are terms better suited to lives turned inside out in popular papers. These days though, it’s hard to deny that the launch of a new model from Spirit, or at least one as significantly different as this one, is quite a big deal. The Ipswich yard has been around for almost three decades now, with the unwavering ethos of building fast, elegant spirit-of-tradition yachts in modern epoxy-saturation timber construction, 2006, in which he sailed a Spirit 54 in Venice) and more recently in , in which Daniel Craig, in his last outing as Bond, sails a Spirit 46 in the Caribbean.
