Ovni 435Review & Buyer’s Guide: The Aluminum Centreboarder You Can Actually Buy

The yard that was rescued twice

Alubat’s history is a history of stubbornness. The yard was among the first in France to commit to aluminium and never stepped back from it, whatever happened to the market or to the company itself. And plenty happened. The 2008 crisis gutted the order book; in September 2013 the company entered receivership. In 2014 a group of fourteen Vendée businessmen bought the yard, which had once employed up to 120 people, for 150,000 euros, saving 25 of 65 jobs. In 2016 Christian Picard, formerly head of the aluminium-specialist brokerage AYC, took charge. And in October 2023 seven of the yard’s own employees, led by Luc Jurien, bought the company they work for.

For a used-boat buyer the practical point is simple: the entire 435 series (2000–2008) was built before the bankruptcy, in the era of long-time director Philippe Aupinel, and owners of that era describe the construction as bullet-proof. The quality dip the community talks about belongs to the underfunded years before the 2013 collapse, and to other models.

What kind of boat is this, if you’re seeing her for the first time

The Ovni 435 is a 13.4-metre aluminium cruising yacht built around a crew of two. Three things separate her from anything in a charter catalogue.

She’s made of metal, without compromise. The hull is marine-grade 5083 aluminium welded over a dense matrix of frames and stringers. Alubat chose the material not for lightness but for survival: on impact, aluminium dents where fibreglass shatters. The price of that toughness is discipline. Aluminium does not tolerate stainless steel or copper against its skin, and most of the survey chapter below is, one way or another, about exactly that.

She has no keel at all. In its place: an aluminium centreboard plate that retracts fully into the hull, and 3.6 tonnes of lead laid inside the bilge. The board carries no ballast; its only job is windward grip. Draft is 2.54 metres with the board down and 0.74 with it up. Rivers, lagoons, drying harbours and sitting upright on the bottom are standard operating modes, not party tricks.

Hydraulics run her underwater life. Both the centreboard and the lifting rudder move on hydraulic cylinders driven by a hand pump. Touch the bottom and both blades kick up: the design assumes that meeting an uncharted rock should end in nothing. The flip side is the Ovni-specific Hydroem hydraulic gear, which has failure modes of its own; they get their own section in the survey chapter.

The series is large by the standards of the class: 115 hulls ordered over eight years. That is the 435’s trump card against Boréal and Garcia. These boats actually exist on the market.

Living with her: the people who’ve crossed oceans aboard

Nobody buys an Ovni 435 for its windward work, and honest owners don’t pretend otherwise. But the range of verdicts is remarkably wide, and it is the model’s great argument on the water.

Between the two poles sits a documented fact: on the passage from Saint Lucia to Martinique, a 435 lost twenty minutes to the smaller Ovni 36, sailed single-handed on older sails. The formula the French forum settles on: Ovnis are very comfortable boats at sea, but they do not surf.

Under power she makes 6.5 knots on about four litres an hour (Volvo D2-55). In marinas she demands attention. “OVNIs are not the easiest boats to handle in tight harbours, especially in cross winds,” says Speedie, who has no bow thruster and occasionally wishes he did.

The model’s ocean record is rich and, unusually, documented boat by boat. Jim Patek’s Let’s Go! logged 45,000 miles in seven years: New Zealand, Australia, Iceland, Shetland. Bajka (hull #99) sailed ARC 2017 and the barefoot route through Panama to New Zealand. Baluba, owned by a Norwegian syndicate with a circumnavigation plan, met forty-plus knots on the nose off Grenaa on her first stormy night: “the boat didn’t even flinch and made us all feel very safe.”

The stability debate: the boat with no keel and no published curve

Every aluminium centreboarder has this conversation eventually, but on the Ovni it runs sharpest of all. The 435’s board is an unballasted aluminium plate of roughly a hundred kilos; all the lead lies in the bilge. Righting moment therefore doesn’t depend on board position, but the centre of gravity sits higher than a keelboat’s. How much higher? Here the argument begins, because Alubat has never published an official stability curve for the 435.

The gap between 126 degrees and 110 is the gap between “a normal ocean boat” and “grounds for doubt.” The Yachting Monthly test of April 2008 put the situation most precisely; its verdict survives in a forum transcription, the original article being no longer accessible, which we record honestly. There will always be those who question whether a boat with an unballasted centreboard belongs on an ocean, and Alubat’s refusal to release the Gz curve feeds the argument; yet the boat carries an appropriate STIX number for CE Category A, and many hundreds of them have cruised the world without incident.

The honest takeaway for a buyer: Speedie’s calculation is the best available figure, and it was made from factory data rather than thin air. But it is an owner’s calculation, not a certificate. The full answer exists in exactly one form, the ISO stability booklet for a specific hull, which is worth requesting from Alubat REFIT or the certification body during purchase. And one more thing, often lost in this debate: centreboarder storm technique inverts the problem itself. Board up, the boat slides sideways down the face of a breaking wave instead of tripping over her own keel. Speedie rode out 48 hours of heavy weather off Cap Blanc that way, and a Norwegian owner of the smaller 385 confirms the same tactic in winter Norway. A boat without a keel holds a course worse, and survives a beam sea better.