Sea Sprite sailboats: one small Rhode Island line, two different designers
Sea Sprite is the story of two boats from two designers, sold under one name and eventually built by the same small Bristol, Rhode Island yard. The 23-foot Sea Sprite -- a full-keel Carl Alberg design dating to 1958 -- traces a winding path through a string of Rhode Island builders before settling with C.E. Ryder in the mid-1970s. Once Ryder had that design in production, it also began building larger sisterships -- the 27 (also listed as the 28), the 30, and the 34 -- to a different set of drawings, from veteran racing designer Alfred "Bill" Luders Jr. The result is a single marque spanning two design lineages and a builder history that even the boats' own owners' association records differently from account to account.
Origins and ownership
The Sea Sprite began in 1958, when American Boat Building of East Greenwich, Rhode Island, wanted to expand its lineup beyond the Block Island 40 and commissioned Carl Alberg -- then serving in the U.S. Coast Guard -- to draw a 22 1/2-foot, full-keel cruiser. It was first marketed as a 22-footer; a later builder rounded the length up, and the boat became the Sea Sprite 23. (One oral-history account on the Sea Sprite Association's site, flagged by its own contributor as unconfirmed, holds that American Boat Building built only the wooden plug for the first mold rather than production boats itself.)
What followed was a chain of small Rhode Island builders -- accounts differ on the exact order. In the early 1960s, fiberglass constructor Herman Wyss of Hope Valley made a mold and began building the boat that became the Sea Sprite 23. Rhode Island builder Sailstar recruited Alberg himself, in the mid-1960s, to rework the design into a roomier Sea Sprite Day Sailor; Clint Pearson bought out Sailstar in 1964. By 1970 a company called Sea Sprites, Inc., on Oak Hill Road in North Kingstown, was producing only the Day Sailor, and in 1971 it moved production to Wickford Shipyard, which offered both the Day Sailor and the racer-cruiser. The rights passed to Bristol builder Clarke E. Ryder around 1974, and by 1979 C.E. Ryder Corp. was the sole builder of Sea Sprites -- a position it held until the company folded in the mid-1980s (accounts range from 1985 to 1986).
At the same time Ryder began building the 23 under its own new molds, it also started producing the larger, Luders-designed sisterships alongside it at its Gooding Avenue plant in Bristol. Ryder was, in fact, better known in its day for a different line entirely: the Gilmer-designed Southern Cross series of double-ended cruisers, introduced at the 1975 Annapolis Sailboat Show.
The designers
Carl Alberg drew the original Sea Sprite the same year he designed the Pearson Triton -- 1958, while still in the Coast Guard -- and also drew the Bristol 27 around that time. The larger Sea Sprite models came from a different hand: Alfred "Bill" Luders Jr. (1909-1999), a naval architect best known for his 5.5-metre racing sloops and for the postwar Luders 16, a popular racing boat with more than 200 built. Luders was born in 1909, a year after his father founded the Stamford, Connecticut yard that bore the family name; that yard closed in 1968, several years before Ryder began building the Luders-designed Sea Sprite models -- Luders contributed the design, not the construction.
Construction through the eras
Sea Sprite construction changed markedly with each builder. Earlier-built 23s had painted fiberglass interiors and external lead keels; C.E. Ryder's new molds fully encapsulated the keel into the hull, added a self-bailing cockpit, and introduced a full interior liner, bronze portholes, and an optional Yanmar 1GM diesel. The hull, deck, and cabinhouse were solid, hand-laid fiberglass, joined at an inward hull-deck flange sealed with 3M 5200 and fastened with machine screws. Ryder built the 23 to order, beginning at hull #525 and reaching a production run of nearly 800 boats. In 1974 the company promoted a 21-year-old's 60-day singlehanded transatlantic passage from Wickford to Falmouth, England, as proof of the 23's ocean-going qualities.
The Luders-designed models used a different construction approach entirely: Airex PVC-foam-cored hulls -- unusual for a production builder in the early 1980s -- with balsa-cored decks and all-wood interior structure, with no molded fiberglass pans or liners. Bulkheads were filleted and bonded to both hull and deck, the hull-to-deck joint was bolted on six-inch centers, and chainplates bolted directly to structural members.
Lines and generations
The Sea Sprite 23 and the larger 27 (also listed as the 28), 30, and 34 represent two distinct design lineages built side by side at the same Bristol yard: Alberg's full-keel daysailer/cruiser on one hand, Luders's foam-cored cruisers on the other. Within that larger group, the 30 was the least popular -- buyers wanted either a bigger or a smaller boat -- and sold only about 20 boats, while the 27/28 and 34 stayed in steadier production until Ryder closed.
Who Sea Sprite is for
Sea Sprite suits buyers drawn to small, traditionally built, full-keel Rhode Island boats with a documented -- if tangled -- builder history. The 23 fits sailors after a simple, solidly built daysailer/cruiser with a long production pedigree; the Luders-designed 27/28, 30, and 34 suit buyers wanting more interior volume from a builder that invested in foam coring and structural bulkheads years before that construction was common on production boats.
