Corbin sailboats: a bluewater cutter designed to be finished twice — once by the yard, once by its owner
Corbin les Bateaux Inc. built essentially one design, offered in two cockpit arrangements: a heavily built cutter meant for long-distance cruising, sold to buyers willing to finish much of the boat themselves. Founder Marius Corbin, himself a professional boat designer, laid out a simple brief in his own brochure — a boat of about 40 feet, comfortable, good to windward and in light air, strong enough for cruising around the world, laid out for two people or a small family, and built to the highest specifications. Nearly every choice the yard made afterward, from the hull layup to the sales structure, followed from that brief.
Origins and ownership
Corbin founded Corbin les Bateaux Inc. in Quebec in 1977, and the company pulled its first hull from the mould in 1979; production later moved across several Quebec shops, including Chateauguay, Napierville, and St-Paul-de-l'Île-aux-Noix. By early 1981, more than 100 boats in various stages of completion had already gone to customers. Corbin later pointed to the postcards he received from owners in Japan, Australia, and South Africa as, in his telling, proof of the boat's seaworthy, livable character.
The designers
The Corbin 39 began as an existing design. Robert Dufour, a Montreal naval architect who specialized in custom work, had already designed and built a one-off cutter named Harmonie — a canoe-stern hull with a long, shallow fin keel and a vertical, skeg-supported rudder — when Corbin, moved after seeing one of Dufour's drawings, sought him out. At Corbin's request, Dufour modified Harmonie with higher topsides and a flush deck to add interior volume, and the two men's collaboration produced the Corbin 39: a flush-deck, aft-cockpit cutter with a short, low pilothouse coachroof. Dufour is the naval architect of record; Corbin, the founder and builder, commissioned the design and shaped its brief.
Construction through the eras
Corbin built a heavy hull by the standards of its era: roughly 11 layers of fiberglass mat and roving around an Airex core, with encapsulated ballast and — by Corbin's own account — extra layers of glass between the ballast and hull so the boat wouldn't sink if the keel were damaged. The Corbin 39 Owners' Association has credited the isophthalic polyester resins used throughout, combined with careful layup, with keeping the boats comparatively free of blistering. Hull construction itself never changed across the whole production run, on both the aft- and centre-cockpit versions.
The one break in that continuity came late in 1982, when fire tore through the Chateauguay yard and destroyed the deck moulds. Corbin used the rebuild to redesign the aft-cockpit boat with a larger cockpit and a higher pilothouse trunk, and to add a pilothouse to the centre-cockpit version as well; both generations that followed also carried a taller rig, with the mast step moved roughly two and a half feet further forward. That fire divides the early hulls — numbered roughly 1 through 129, with a small cockpit footwell, narrow side decks, and a low pilothouse trunk — from the redesigned generation that came after. Much of the boats' hardware, masts, and rigging came from Everett Bastet of E.B. Spars in Hudson, Quebec.
Lines and generations
Corbin's range centered on the 39 in its two cockpit layouts, aft-cockpit and centre-cockpit, plus a smaller 35-foot version that appeared briefly in 1981. The scale stayed modest throughout: the yard moulded roughly 200 hulls in total, and factory crews carried only about 15 of them through to a fully finished state — the rest were sold as kits, at one of four completion stages, for their buyers to finish. Production wound down around 1990, though sources differ on the precise final year. After the yard closed, former employee Giles Bastien came to hold the moulds and, per a 1996 account, held a couple of unfinished hull-and-deck kits on hand and was weighing custom orders, though he had no confirmed commitments at the time.
Who Corbin is for
Corbin drew sailors who wanted a strongly built cutter for long-distance, even circumnavigating cruising, and who were comfortable buying into a boat's construction rather than its finish — owners willing to install their own interior, systems, or rig rather than take delivery of a turnkey yacht. That owner-completion model, more than any single design detail, is what defines a Corbin.
