Spirit sailboats: one name, three unrelated builders
"Spirit" on a sailboat's transom doesn't identify a company. It's a name three separate builders arrived at independently, on two continents, sharing nothing else - not a designer, not an era, not a construction method. Good Old Boat's review of the Glastron-built Spirit 28 made the point directly, noting the boat "has no connection to the Van de Stadt-designed Spirit 28 or the English boatbuilder Spirit Yachts" - a third and fourth Spirit tangled into the same name. The American line came from Glastron, an Austin, Texas powerboat maker that built small fiberglass daysailers for eleven years in the 1970s. A Belgian yard, Bootbouwerij Van Heygen, built a separate run of offshore racers in the same decade. And Spirit Yachts of Ipswich, England, founded in 1993, builds wood-epoxy modern classics that predate neither. Anyone shopping "a Spirit" needs to settle which of these before anything else about the boat is worth discussing.
Origins and ownership
Glastron was founded by Bob Hammond, a plastics engineer with aerospace and fishing-boat experience, who built his first boat to his own design in a rented Austin garage in 1956; the company name was a hybrid of "fiberglass" and "tron," not - as sometimes assumed - a nod to boat dealer and partner Bill Gaston. Hammond was still running the company when it entered the sailboat market in the early 1970s, retiring in 1974. Glastron had been building hulls for Austin's North American Yachts and renamed the models Spirit when it acquired that company; the business was sold to Genmar Holdings in 1987, which moved it to Minnesota, filed for Chapter 11 in 2009, and saw Glastron bought by PBH Marine Group in 2010.
The Belgian yard, Bootbouwerij Van Heygen of the Rupel region, built Spirit-badged sailboats designed by Jacques De Ridder that a retrospective on the Belgian sailing site ClubRacer.be called "model per model icons," crediting the line with a Quarter Ton Cup win in the late 1960s and podium finishes for its later 32 and 36/37 crews in Low Countries offshore championships. Enthusiasts have since talked about a reunion honoring De Ridder and the Van Heygen brothers.
Spirit Yachts of Ipswich was founded in 1993 by Sean McMillan and his friend Mick Newman, in a disused farm building in Benhall, Suffolk - McMillan had left a job running a London ad agency to build boats along the Suffolk coast of his youth, and the first Spirit was 37ft. A 70-footer that didn't fit their shed in 2003 forced the move to the company's current Ipswich marina premises. Nigel Stuart joined as managing director in 2015, and the yard doubled in size under him; the company's own site names Karen Underwood as managing director. Its logo, fittingly for a yard built on craft, is the outline of a whisky still.
The designers
Hank Hinckley designed the American Spirit 21, also known as the 6.5; Robert Finch designed the Spirit 28, credited alongside Earl Blackwell on the sales brochure, and did most of his sixteen boat designs in the early 1970s, a catalog that also includes the Catalina 27 and Coronado 30.
Jacques De Ridder - Jac., Kees, and Koos in various sources, all one person - designed the entire Belgian line. The ClubRacer.be retrospective credited him with boats that sailed fast and safe despite their 1970s-80s IOR pedigree.
Sean McMillan designed the UK yachts himself, refining the wood-epoxy technique for roughly 25 years by 2011 to build progressively lighter hulls, and made the underbody itself the design break from tradition: getting away from the long keel and keel-hung rudder configuration that classic yachts had relied on.
Construction through the eras
Glastron's Spirit 28 - hull and balsa-cored deck hand-laid in fiberglass and joined on a hull flange - represented standard American production-fiberglass practice for its era; production ended in 1981 after roughly 300 were built. The Belgian line was built in fiberglass as well, offered with a choice of keel configurations including a fin keel. Spirit Yachts took a different route entirely: hulls in Sapele, Douglas fir, yellow cedar, and khaya, interiors in mahogany, yellow cedar, and teak, built on laminated ring frames - commonly Brazilian cedar - overlaid with double-diagonal cold-molded veneers, bonded with West System epoxy, and finished with a stabilizing glass/epoxy layer before an Awlgrip topcoat.
Lines and generations
The American line ran a tight sequence: the North American 23, renamed the Spirit 23 on Glastron's acquisition of that company, followed by Hinckley's Spirit 21 and finally Finch's Spirit 28 - the largest and last of the line, in production until Glastron's eleven-year run in sailboats ended in 1981.
The Belgian line spans the 29 (fewer than 100 built), the 32 (roughly 127 to under 200, depending on the source), the 36 (87 hulls from its first build in 1986), the 37, and the 41 - De Ridder's designs deepening from Quarter Ton racer to larger offshore boats across that run.
Spirit Yachts grew from its single 37-foot founding boat to a range spanning 46 to 130 feet within two decades, adding two deckhouse models, the DH50 and DH57, along the way. The Spirit 54 that appeared in the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale took the yard from being known within the UK to the world stage; the 100ft Bermudan sloop Gaia followed in 2007, built to compete in Mediterranean superyacht regattas. By its 25th anniversary in 2018, the yard counted 63 boats in the water and 67 including boats then under construction.
Who Spirit is for
There's no single "Spirit buyer" the way there is for a one-builder make. Someone drawn to the American line wants a compact, single-decade 1970s daysailer; someone drawn to the Belgian line wants an IOR-pedigreed offshore racer with a Quarter Ton Cup-winning design behind it; someone drawn to the English yard wants custom or semi-custom wood-epoxy construction at a scale and price the other two never approached. What unites them is only the name on the transom - everything a buyer actually needs to evaluate starts with figuring out which of the three that name is pointing to.
