Thanks for the replies. Tom, I appreciate your nostalgia for the Solcat. I sailed them as a kid, and we have owned one for 22 years. Heavy snows brougth a few trees down on it last winter so it was a blessing to find this other boat for the right price since parts for these things are getting very hard to find these days. Your reasoning for the the extra cross beam makes sense, and now that I look closely I can see that there was a repair done on the hull just forwrd of the mast.