SOME LIKE IT YACHT
When the James Bond production team first rang Spirit Yachts asking to borrow a brand new boat for Casino Royale, boss Sean McMillan was thrilled but nervous. “I had one question for them,” he recalls: “‘You’re not going to blow it up are you?”’
They didn’t, though filming did take the newly built Spirit 54 on a six-month journey of 10,000 miles, from Suffolk and Liverpool in the UK to Florida and the Caribbean, before an about-turn to Europe and back to Venice via Croatia.
It was the first time in 300 years that a yacht had sailed on the Grand Canal, and the mast had to be taken out every time they filmed in order to make that piece of history. “We had to take the rig out and put it in again to times in all to sail beneath the bridges. We needed a barge with a crane on board to do the job,” recalls McMillan, whose boatbuilding career goes back to childhood – he made his first wooden dinghy at the age of 12.
Bond is back aboard another Spirit in his latest adventure, No Time to Die, where he’s dedicated his retirement to a life of sailing and fishing in the Caribbean... until his old CIA buddy Felix Leiter arrives.
This time there was a different problem to overcome with the privately owned Spirit 46, which would spend two months in Jamaica with Daniel Craig and the crew. “When we got the call, the boat had already been hauled and laid up for the winter in Long Island,” says McMillan. “She was completely boxed in, so we had to get the yard to move the others before we could truck her from Newport to Fort Lauderdale and sail over to Jamaica.”
Bond and boats go together like, well, Bond and martinis. But they are not the sole preserve of 007. Yachts and the movies have enjoyed a dose relationship since the silent age
