An Analysis of Slocum's 37' Yawl

'SPRAY'

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Spray Original Sail Plan | Spray Original Sail Plan Inverse | Spray Original Hull Lines |
Spray Original Body Lines
Article & Screen Shots Copyright 2011 - 2016 Michael Kasten

QUALITIES OF SLOCUM'S SPRAY

First, it should be known that I am actually a fan of the original Spray - i.e. the one that
Joshua Slocum sailed around the world. However I am only a fan in a limited sense.
Allow me to elaborate...

What the ORIGINAL Spray was able to contribute most notably for Slocum's voyage was
excellent directional stability, i.e. outstanding and apparently infallible course keeping
ability. This inherent self-steering ability was the result of several factors:

A long straight keel, deepening aft

A full and rounded bow
A long straight run aft
A forward-of-amidships center of buoyancy.

This combination allowed the vessel to behave somewhat like a dart, with the weight
forward and the feathers aft. Alternately you can imagine a tear-drop shaped bomb with
fins aft - the ideal shape for stability in a free-fall environment.
This made the Spray rather poor to windward, but superb off the wind. The Spray was not
slow, as many might think. On the contrary, the Spray was capable of quite fast sailing
when off the wind or on a reach. This was due to her shoal draft, far forward CB, long
straight run of the buttock lines aft, extreme stiffness due to her excessive beam and
shallow draft, and having a low aspect but very ample gaff yawl rig. In other words, a
slippery shape and plenty of sail area...!

DRAWBACKS OF SLOCUM'S SPRAY

As a long distance voyaging boat the Spray did have several drawbacks, the most
important of which were excessive beam and extremely shoal draft. This combination
resulted in the vessel being just as stable upside down as it was upright. In plain words,
the Spray had zero self-righting ability.
It should be noted that the wooden oyster smack that Slocum named the "Spray" was
presented to him as a gift, i.e. for free. At that point it was a rotten old hulk which Slocum
then proceeded to restore on a very limited budget. Due to Slocums extraordinary talent
as a master mariner he had quite a successful voyage despite the limitations of the vessel,
which was never intended for sailing offshore in the first place, but rather intended as an
inshore dragger with ample sail area for that purpose.
This is a prime example of a commonly shared characteristic amongst many of the well
known long distance sailing accomplishments... they were not the result of long arduous
planning to create the "ideal" voyaging boat. Instead, the most spectacular individual
sailing achievements occurred when a determined sailor encountered a more or less
suitable craft that they could acquire inexpensively and put to sea in without too much
fooling around. In other words, they were opportunists who made expedient use of what
was ready to hand... It is a good lesson!
Slocum's spectacular voyage with the Spray was no exception.

FAITHFUL REPLICAS...
The above comments apply to the ORIGINAL Spray, as rebuilt by Joshua Slocum, which
has subsequently been reproduced by others such as Pete Culler and Gilbert Klingel,
often with good success. Most of them were highly faithful to the original.
I was fortunate enough to go aboard a very good replica of the Spray in Hawaii in 1979,
built by Bob Carr in Vermont, and which he single handed from there to Honolulu. He
had been some 180 days from Panama to Hawaii, possibly a record for the slowest
passage on that route..! However Bob had encountered long periods of calm, and a
number of storms. His mains'l was blown out, and he was nearly down to the bottom of
his "bean barrel" even though he did catch a lot of fish..! It was impressive to see three
large garbage pails in the store room: one for beans, one for rice, one for wheat.
A friend Michael Colfer and I helped Bob Carr paint the boat's bottom while he was
hauled out at Keehi Lagoon, near Honolulu. We heard several good stories during that
time and we were well fed, albeit on chicken stew of questionable vintage. There being
no refrigeration aboard, this was cause for concern. Like many before him, Bob Carr
sailed without an engine so he used kerosene for lights and kerosene for cooking. The
only electricity aboard was inside his flashlight and Zenith transoceanic radio...!
Another friend, George Maynard, built a faithful replica of Slocum's Spray in Noank,
Connecticut, Slocum's original starting place. Maynard named his vessel "Scud" and
subsequently sailed it around the world with his wife and young children - a daughter and
two sons. Maynard's voyage, like that of Slocum and Bob Carr, was accomplished
without the aid of an engine or any fancy electronics...
Recently I have read that a sailor purchased Maynard's "Scud" and has once again
circumnavigated in the vessel, also without an engine. Quite a number of Spray replicas
have achieved similar success. Others have met with shipwreck or loss without a trace
such as the Pandora. This in fact is what happened to the original, which took along Mr.
Slocum himself.

... AND THE UNFAITHFUL

In recent years the name SPRAY has been used by a few boat designers in order to take
advantage of name recognition for marketing purposes. Most notably, several steel
"Spray" models have become popular among amateur steel boat builders. This is largely
because the plans are very cheap to buy. Despite the obvious fact that those designs have
nothing in common with the original Spray, the renown of the name itself is apparently
convincing to those amateur builders. The lack of any semblance to the original is also
the case in terms of the rig, the hull shape and many other parameters, but most notably it
is so in terms of their appearance.

I regard these so-called Spray designs as being extremely crude attempts, especially in
terms of capturing the beauty of the original Spray. In my opinion these Spray poseurs
have little if any relationship to the original except to say that they have borrowed the
"Spray" name, and that they are fat, overweight, and total dogs to windward - nothing
else in any way resembles the original.
Further, those vessels have failed to improve upon the inadequate ultimate stability of the
original Spray. As insult to injury, the structure of these vessels is inordinately complex,
in other words poorly adapted to amateur construction, as is their claim. I am quite sure
you know the vessels of which I speak... I do not need to name names.

MODELING THE ORIGINAL SPRAY

Having said the above, I have always been curious about the SPRAY, in particular to
understand and possibly replicate its excellent course keeping ability for use on other
designs. In order to know more about the SPRAY, I went to the trouble to model the
design so that I could investigate its hydrostatics, stability, balance and sailing
performance in greater detail. Images that show the results of that modeling effort can be
seen in the following links and the image below:
Original Spray Above Aft | Original Spray Above Forward

Click Image for Larger View

PARTICULARS & COMMENTARY

Particulars of Slocum's Original Spray are:

Length on Deck: 36' - 9"

Length on WL: 32' - 2" (including stem)
Length on WL: 31' - 3" (excluding stem)
Beam on Deck: 14' - 1"

Beam on WL: 13' - 9.5"

Draft at DWL: 4' - 2.5"
Displacement: 16.1 Long Tons (including keel)
Displacement to Length: 483
Long'l Position of CB: 50% (including keel, measured from stem rabbet)
Prismatic Coefficient: .673 (including keel)
Prismatic Coefficient: .668 (body only)
Beam to Length on Deck: 38.5%
WL Beam to WL Length: 44% (excluding stem)
Yawl Rig Sail Area: 1,137 sq. ft.
Sail CE Lead vs CLR: 8.9% (about right considering extreme beam, shoal draft,
and low aspect rig)
SA / Displacement Ratio: 16.6 (typical range: 16 to 21, therefore fairly low)
SA / Wetted Surface Ratio: 2.5 (typical range: 2.0 to 2.6, therefore about right)

Commentary: Looking at the above, a few comments are in order.

A Displacement to Length of 483 is quite high. Please see my Calculations PDF

for the ranges one should expect, which indicate a D/L more on the order of
around 300 to 325 for fairly heavy cruisers.
The Prismatic Coefficient at .673 is very high. Spray, having been originally built
as an oyster smack, was designed for maximum carrying capacity on a shallow
draft, therefore a high Cp is not entirely out of place. Such a high Cp means very
full ends, in this case weighted slightly more in favor of the bow than would be a
modern sailboat. A high Cp favors high speed, but is a disadvantage in terms of
wavemaking resistance when sailing at slower speeds as is more often the case.
More typically a sailing yacht's Cp should be in the range of between .55 and .58
for all-around cruising, possibly a bit higher for a racing sailboat.
In my view, for this type of vessel used as a yacht, Cp would ideally be reduced to
somewhere in the range of .58 to .61 at the most, which would still favor higher
sailing speeds, but which would confer improved pitch dampening and added
buoyancy in the ends for heavy weather.
Sail area to wetted surface is quite good in the original Spray, indicating good
light weather performance, however SA to Displacement is less than optimum.
Sail area could therefore be increased, especially so given the enormous initial
stability (stiffness) under sail. See my Sail Area Ratios PDF for more information.
A ratio of WL Beam to WL Length of 44% is really rather extreme. Something on
the order of around 33% is much more in keeping with sea-going sail boats.
Assuming a VCG of 6 inches above the DWL (an assumption only), the
Dellenbaugh Angle is calculated to be 5.8 degrees with 15 knots of wind abeam.
Raising the VCG to 9" above the DWL only results in a small increase in heel, to
6 degrees... in other words EXTREMELY stiff, as would be expected. A typical
range of heel angles for this size sail boat is on the order of 13 to 19 degrees.
Quite a difference..!

Model Notes: It should be pointed out that Slocums originally published lines DO NOT
match between all three views. In other words, one or more of the views is incorrect, or
just poorly drawn, or maybe the lines were messed up by the publisher in trying to
squeeze them onto a book page, who knows... Since the model I created is a fully 3-D
NURBS surface model, it has no choice but to match in all three views! The model I
created is as close as I can get it to the original design.
In 1908 an article was written about the Spray for the Rudder magazine by naval architect
C. Andrade Jr. In the article C. Andrade published his own faired lines drawings and
calculations. Interestingly, Andrades calculated hull data match my own very closely.
In 1976 another article was written for Rudder magazine by Naval architect Weston
Farmer, who also faired the lines and published them along with the offsets . Farmers
calculated displacement, max section area, waterplane area, etc. do not match my own
modeling results, nor those of C. Andrade. Farmer's max section, WP, etc. were less than
what I have found, and were off by some two tons in displacement. So even though the
Farmer lines are sweet and nicely faired, I intentionally did not use Farmers lines
because I wanted get as close as possible to the original.
Naval architect Pete Culler actually built a Spray of his own, then wrote a book about
building the boat and sailing it. In his book, Culler published his own lofted and faired
Spray lines drawing. But Culler had changed the design slightly (deeper keel, different
bow profile, different rabbet line, different cabins, etc.) so I did not use Cullers lines.
Among them, C. Andrade Jr. comes the closest, and even though there are a few minor
differences, my data matches Andrades hull data very well. It should be noted that C.
Andrade was a contemporary (more or less) of Slocum and was therefore possibly better
positioned to have access to Slocums own records.
Between Culler, Farmer, Andrade and Slocum, I elected to use the original lines from
Slocums book in order to make the most accurate possible model of the ORIGINAL
Spray.

REFINEMENTS..?
My conclusions are that the original SPRAY model would benefit greatly by being made
deeper and longer, with possibly slightly greater freeboard, but without changing the
favorable attributes of the hull. With those changes accomplished, the ratio of beam to
length will be brought more in line with traditional cruisers, as will be the ratio of beam
to depth.
These changes would be introduced primarily for the sake of enhanced large angle
stability (greater length and depth), but also to improve the windward ability of the hull
(greater depth & outside ballast). In so doing, ideally the Center of Buoyancy would not
be moved aft, but as a consequence of the deeper body the CB would be lowered as

would the CG. This combination would preserve a considerable measure of the vessel's
excellent stiffness without degrading its inherently excellent voyaging capabilities.
After I created a NURBS surface model of the original SPRAY, I then made the above
mentioned modifications to the model to see what they might offer. Though my
modifications may not be all that easy to detect in the images linked below, they have
indeed produced the desired result...

Modified Spray Perspective Forward | Modified Spray Perspective Aft

THE MODIFIED SPRAY MODEL

Length on deck is increased to 48 feet, and the WL length to around 41 feet; beam is
unchanged; depth of hull is increased and draft is 4.72 feet; displacement is increased to
22.9 long tons; and sail area is increased. As a result of having been made longer but not

wider, the Displacement to Length has been reduced to around 329, which is still a robust
hull shape but not overly heavy.
The Prismatic Coefficient is down to .64 including the keel and stem, and .66 for the hull
body only. This is still a bit too high for optimum performance at typical sailing speeds,
but is indicative of a high speed potential and ample buoyancy in the ends for better
support in heavy weather. The Center of Buoyancy remains approximately amidships,
therefore is unchanged. The fore and aft distribution of displacement is unchanged, i.e.
still a full bow and fine run aft.
The rudder was made wholly external, which required that the transom rake be changed
slightly, and that the deadwood be extended slightly farther aft. The aft deck has been
given an overhang just sufficient to house and protect the rudder, and to create a
convenient landing for the mizzen mast.
In the image above, you will notice that I have also raised the aft deck to the height of the
bulwark top, then introduced a toe rail around the aft deck. Raising the aft deck is not at
all necessary, but it does provide advantages in terms of reserve buoyancy and self
righting, as well as providing considerably greater interior space aft.
Along with those hull refinements, a few improvements will ideally also be made to the
rig not to change it from Slocum's Yawl rig, but to increase the relative size of the rig
for the sake of improved performance. Ideally the SA / Displacement ratio would be
above 18, preferably closer to 20. This implies a Sail Area of around 1,500 sq. ft. or more.
I have proposed a sail area of 1,700 sq. ft.
The amount of lead from the CE to CLR should stay the same, i.e. approximately 9%, or
possibly it could be reduced slightly due to the reduced beam ratio. By increasing sail
area, a higher CE will result, but this will be offset by the lower CG inherent in the
deeper hull. The result of having less beam will be an increased amount of heel vs the
original SPRAY. Having a lower D/L ratio, increased sail area, a deeper hull and external
ballast, the result will be better performance on all points of sail, especially to windward.
All of these changes are possible without having to degrade the inherent excellent
tracking of the original Spray design on a passage, nor to adversely affect the traditional
aesthetics of the original.

THE ORIGINAL SPRAY vs THE MODIFIED SPRAY...

In The Rudder magazine, Vol. 21, 1909, there is an article by C. Andrade that attempts to
analyze the Spray. It is interesting to note that the article was written roughly a month
after Slocum was lost at sea... It is also interesting to read a fairly elaborate but rather
arcane analysis using the extant naval architecture principles of the day...! Anyone
curious can read the article on Google Books.

In any analysis of the qualities of the Spray, it must first be pointed out that:
1. To my knowledge the vertical center of gravity of the original Spray has never been
documented.
2. The lines of the Spray as published by Slocum in Sailing Alone Around the World are
not accurate. In other words, as noted above the three views do not match!
Others have published their own version of the lines of the Spray, including Weston
Farmer, Pete Culler, and C. Andrade. I have not checked those versions of the lines
against the original, nor against my own model of the Spray, but I will say for certain that
the lines that Slocum published are not accurate. As mentioned above, per my own
modeling efforts the lines and calculations done by C. Andrade are likely to be the closest
to the original.
SLOCUM'S ORIGINAL SPRAY
As noted above, the model I created of the original Spray is as close as I can make it
according to Slocum's published lines. In my analysis of the original Spray model I have
assumed the VCG to be approximately 8 inches above the WL. This is only an
assumption, since I have not taken the trouble to actually calculate the VCG, however it
is an assumption that's based on having calculated the VCG of several other heavily built
wooden craft, so it is probably not far off.
Using that VCG, the stability curve shown below was derived. This curve takes credit for
the volume of the deck houses, as well as the floatation of the masts. Despite those
credits, it is evident that stability is lost at 100 degrees of heel, after which the vessel is
quite stable when inverted.

Click for Larger Image

If I lower the VCG to the WL height, then the righting moments that I calculate closely
match those calculated by C. Andrade. It is therefore evident that C. Andrade made the
assumption that the VCG is located at the WL, which I believe to be much too optimistic,
especially considering the inside ballast of stones and cement..!
However if the VCG were to actually be located at the WL (highly unlikely), then the
point of vanishing stability would be approximately 116 degrees quite a difference..! In
other words, the righting curve derived by C. Andrade is likely to be in error by that
amount, or possibly even more (say in the event that I have also been too optimistic with
regard to the VCG).
A range of positive stability of 100 degrees or less is considered to be inadequate for a
sailing vessel. In the EU, a Stability Index is calculated, called the STIX value. With the
VCG located 8 inches above the WL per my assumption, Spray earns a STIX score of 25,
whereas the EU requirement for all ocean operations is a minimum STIX score of 32.
Thus the Spray fails the STIX criterion by over 20%. Ideally there will be a substantial
margin of safety above the minimum score, i.e. a STIX score in the mid to upper 40's or
greater.

Regardless of all the many discussions of the Spray and her admirable qualities, and
notwithstanding the obvious achievements of the vessel, the stability characteristics of the
original Spray are plainly inadequate.
THE IMPROVED SPRAY MODEL
I have gone to the trouble of modeling the original Spray so that I could see what
improvements could be made starting with the original Spray lines. I wanted to modify
the model in such a way as to preserve the good qualities of the Spray, but to improve the
stability range and sailing performance.
Using the modified Spray model that I eventually settled on at 48' length on deck and 41'
WL length with a deeper hull body, and assuming the VCG to be 3" above the WL,
(possibly too conservative, i.e. a higher VCG than would actually be the case), the
stability range increases to 121 degrees, and the STIX score comes to 43.6.
Assuming it is possible to lower the VCG all the way to the WL (possibly achievable
with the deeper hull, deepening the keel farther, and by using external ballast), then the
stability range comes to 126 degrees and the STIX score is 49.1.

Click for Larger Image

This is a dramatic improvement, even though I would like to do even better with the
range of positive stability
My primary goals in making such tweaks to the SPRAY have been to see what could be
done to make the design safer and more seaworthy. I also wanted to show that such
improvements could be made without affecting (i.e. screwing up) the excellent traditional
aesthetics of the original, nor to adversely affect its excellent tracking ability and its
consequent value as an ocean voyager.
The updated model preserves the balance and course keeping of the original, and makes a
variety of improvements for the sake of performance on all points of sail, and would be a
much safer platform for voyaging on the briny deep!
OTHER CHANGES...??
The question arises, "Would I make additional changes...?"
Yes. I would prefer to reduce the beam some, but without changing the distribution of
displacement. Displacement would decrease, and the resulting model would have a more
modest D/L ratio. With that change made, I'd prefer to reduce the prismatic coefficient to
between .57 and .60 for the sake of improved all around sailing performance. This
combination would result in a more comfortable ride, and would actually increase the
range of positive stability...!

CONCLUSIONS...
Many are attracted to the SPRAY simply on the basis of it having been the first vessel to
carry a human around the world, sailing single handed. It is quite an achievement to say
the least. What must be realized however is that the voyage was accomplished by a
determined and very experienced professional sea captain, not by your ordinary beach
bum.
Just like many other world-voyaging sailors who have also achieved extraordinary sailing
feats, Slocum was an opportunist who made excellent use of what was available to him,
in his case a freely provided old wreck which he rebuilt on a shoe-string, and which he
then quite stunningly sailed into permanent fame and an honored place in our history of
the sea.
Before Slocum left on his historic voyage, dockside wags said of the SPRAY, "It'll
crawl...!"
When he returned, his dockside advisors would only deign to say, "You were lucky...!"

Luck or no, one cannot deny Slocum's extraordinary achievement, which was
accomplished more or less in spite of the tool that he was given, i.e. the SPRAY. In other
words, it was Slocum's WILL and long experience at sea that allowed him to achieve this
feat, rather than it having been some sort of caprice conferred upon him by some
imagined magical attributes inherent in the vessel on which he sailed.
Copyright 2011 - 2016 Michael Kasten