I will back up on the not bothering with a solent stay. I didnt realize that you have
roller furling on your headstay which makes working your way down from a large light air sail to a
storm jib, a lot of
work, and can be dangerous to keep control of luff groove
head sails , roller or not. I assume that by self tacking you mean a club
jib? That makes the roller harder to deal with and difficult to make use of a solent stay. A roller and self
tender is nice and easy on a coastal cruiser where if the
wind kicks up enough to need to roll the jib, you will probably
motor sail back to port. If you really intend to do passages in your boat you will find that once you roll a jib up for rising wind, it becomes more and more difficult/dangerous to have to roll it out and hoist something smaller and the club (an ankle breaker) on the foredeck will make dealing with a solent stay much more difficult. I can only tell you what worked for me on a similar size boat on a 2 year
cruise of 8 or 9 thousand miles. I left
San Francisco with 5 headsails. A drifter that I made myself, a 150, a 125 , a roller (on its own luff wire) 110 and a
storm jib. I used the roller 110 a lot on the
California coast but started using the 150 and then the drifter a lot once I was south of
San Diego. The 1.5 oz.drifter would just keep me moving enough for steerage in almost no wind. I didnt have an
engine (or prop drag) and loved the drifter. 6 or 8 hundred miles out on the
Mexico to the
Marquesas passage, running wing and wing in the trades I looked up and the upper swivel of the roller unit had sawed thru most of the headstay. Broken wires were sticking out from the stay. I had a spare length of wire and a nico press tool and made up a stay and replaced the headstay. I never used the roller sail again. I did use the drifter in the light air areas, but I made the
Marquesas without having real doldrums. I could go on, but in the end, the sails I valued the most were the drifter and the storm jib. The two extremes of wind force. If my sails had been on a foil, changing jibs would have been much more difficult and changing down as the wind came up would have been more dangerous. Roller
furling has its place, but on a
small boat without some easy way to hoist a storm jib, it becomes a liability. Every sailor has different techniques and some might think mine are wrong, but it worked out very well on a similar size boat to yours. Short of a boat that was designed from the beginning to be a true
cutter, I would not recommend roller furling/reefing for a small passage maker. I would definitely not recommend changing your rig to something else. Just get a good selection of sails when you are ready to go long distances. In the mean time sail the hell out of it and learn. Sorry for being so long winded _____Grant.