Some Corbin 39 have fitted out with Solent rig. Some of these are without the inner forestay, and others retain the inner forestay for the staysail. Here are good photos of #49 “Hanna” that are fairly self-explanatory.
“Hanna” is one of the few solent-rigged in the fleet, apparently very successfully so. Below are some notes from one of “Hanna”‘s owners (JA) with an explanatory comment by me (DS).
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JA – a pilothouse cutter and also has a solent stay, forward of the furler. That’s how she was rigged when we bought her in 1998. We love it for the ability to fly “twin” headsails, on two poles, as you can see on my FB cover photo. We crossed the Atlantic (westbound) almost entirely like that, as well as much of the passage between Galapagos and French Polynesia.
At the masthead, the two stays used to be fastened to a Delta plate, which then had a single attachment point to the mast. That was bad engineering, as we learned and after many years (too many, and a couple rigging failures) we added a fitting just below the masthead so they are now attached separately.
JA – the inner of the two stays is the furler, not typical I guess. We have two Hank on headsails we can use on the outer one. Our furler is a small Genoa, probably only about 108% and is great most of the time. We have a larger Genoa (120-130%?) and we have a yankee cut jib (90%?). We can fly either one in tandem with the furler, and can swap them out, without taking the pole down if required. We did so on our second Atlantic crossing as conditions changed. We have two poles on two tracks and can also gybe the two headsails if necessary. It’s not the easiest rig to sail but we love having all the options. Our staysail stay is fixed. My husband built a Highfield lever, which makes it removable but we don’t currently use it.
In the current configuration, the furler does not foul on the outer stay when furling. For a very brief time, we put the stays side by side and then it did, so we quickly changed it back.
DS – In a Solent rig the two forestays are extremely close together. In the most common usage this means that one can run dead downwind without using a genoa, but still having a very large amount of sail out in a controlled fashion (and minimal boat-rolling). On larger boats they are often set up with both of the forestays being roller-furlers. This means that a single crew person can reduce sail (both sails) on their own, extremely handy if it blows up overnight. As I understand it the way “Hanna” is rigged the sail area can be reduced by roller-furling one one stay but not on the other.