Alubat sailboats for sale

Buying a used Alubat: an aluminum hull built to be sailed hard, not admired at the dock

A used Alubat — almost always an Ovni, sometimes a Cigale or the newer OvniCat — is a different kind of purchase than a used fiberglass production cruiser. The aluminum hull and lifting keel are the whole point: Yachting World has called the Ovni line's bare-aluminum, lift-keel cruisers synonymous with bluewater cruising since the 1970s, built to dry out on a beach or push into water a fin-keeled boat can't reach. That design logic rewards a buyer who understands the material, because a well-maintained aluminum hull is exceptionally tough while a neglected one can develop problems a fiberglass surveyor won't know to look for. Which design era, and which owner, built the boat in front of you matters more here than model name or length alone.

Which era to target

Alubat's design office has changed hands several times, and each handover shows up in the boat. Ovnis from the 1970s through the 1990s — the stretch that includes the Ovni 28's original hard-chine, lifting-keel formula — came mostly off Philippe Briand's board, with occasional models such as the Ovni 33 and Ovni 345 drawn by other named architects. Marc Lombard took over the flagship for the 2000s and 2010s, culminating in the 2018 Ovni 450. Everything built since 2019 — the 400, 370, 430 and 490 — comes from a newer partnership between Mortain & Mavrikios and the CBA office, and that shift brought real construction changes: reviewers found heavier "semi-thick" aluminum plating on the 2023 Ovni 430 next to the uniform plate carried by the 2019 Ovni 400, plus a new welded-frame build method introduced on the Ovni 370. A buyer drawn to the simplicity of the original Briand-era boats and a buyer who wants the modern deck-saloon layouts and refined plating of the post-2019 range are effectively shopping two different products under one model family. The Cigale line sits apart entirely, running from Jean-Marie Finot's 1994 originals through Marc Lombard to the Finot-Conq-designed, swing-keeled Cigale 15 QR — a lighter, faster cruiser-racer rather than an expedition boat.

What to inspect across the range

Aluminum construction changes what a survey should prioritize. A Sailboat Cruising review of the Ovni 395 notes that aluminum boats need extra attention to stray electrical current, wiring, sacrificial anodes and paint systems, and that warning shows up in practice on more than one model: Yachting Monthly's review of the Ovni 365 flags electrolysis as a specific concern, passing along one owner's advice to "ensure you are not a giant anode." Any sign of neglected shore-power wiring, worn-down anodes, or failing paint on an aluminum Ovni or Cigale deserves a harder look than the same wear would on a fiberglass boat of the same age.

Navigating the lineup

Ovni sizes run from the low 30s to the high 40s feet across most of the production years, with the newest 490 pushing toward 50; the Cigale ULDB line runs larger and lighter, into the high 50s and 60 feet. OvniCat, launched in 2022, adds a catamaran option for buyers who want Alubat's aluminum bluewater approach spread across two hulls rather than one. The full model directory on this page breaks each of these out by year and length for closer comparison.