Alubat sailboats: the French yard that built its identity in aluminum
Il Giornale della Vela has described Alubat as the French shipyard that has built the largest number of aluminum sailboats in history, and the description fits a company that has spent five decades refining one idea: a lifting-keel cruising hull, welded up in aluminum, tough and light enough to be sailed hard and beached without ceremony. Yves Roucher set that course at the start, founding the yard on a specific brief — aluminum sailing hulls for travelers, explorers and adventurers — and the Ovni range that grew out of it has carried the same premise through a change of owners, a near-collapse, and a full handover of its design office.
Origins and ownership
The Alubat shipyard was created in Les Sables d'Olonne in 1973; Roucher is credited with founding the company the following year, and by 1974 the yard had launched the prototype that would become the first Ovni, a 25-foot lifting-keel boat already built in aluminum. Its first catalogued model, a 25-footer named Vodka, appeared in 1976.
The business came close to disappearing decades later. Alubat filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012, and at the end of 2013 or in 2014, depending on the account, fourteen Vendée business owners bought the yard, saving 25 of the roughly 120 jobs the company had carried at its peak. None of the fourteen were nautical-industry specialists, per Luc Jurien's account — they simply didn't want the history to end — and Michel Berson represented the group as president for about seven years. Under that ownership the business rebuilt itself into an export-driven operation, recording 70 percent of its sales abroad by late 2023, with a workforce that grew from about thirty in 2021, when Jurien arrived as general director, to roughly fifty. Jurien had circumnavigated the world aboard his own Ovni 56 before joining Alubat to run the Ovni brand. In October 2023, Le Journal des Entreprises reported that the fourteen shareholders transferred 100 percent of the shipyard's capital to Jurien; Ouest-France, covering the same transaction, described it as a buyout by seven employees and noted that production manager Thierry le Prince — who had started at Alubat twenty years earlier as a cable installer — became a shareholder alongside him.
The designers
Across roughly 27 Ovni models built over five decades, Philippe Briand, Marc Lombard, Alain Mortain and Yiannis Mavrikios have done most of the design work, though the range has occasional exceptions: Gilles Vaton drew the Ovni 33 (1982-1985) and Michel Joubert the Ovni 345 (1997-2006). Briand's involvement began with the Ovni 28 in 1978, the yard's first true lifting-keel hull with hard chines and the boat that set the tone for everything that followed; he later returned for the Ovni 495 (2007-2012), and by 1985 Alubat had also built French Kiss, his 12-metre design that raced that year's America's Cup. Lombard took over the flagship Ovni 450 in 2018, and from 2019 the design office passed to a new partnership — Mortain & Mavrikios working alongside Jean-Pierre Brouns, Alain Bechetoille and Nina Karlseder's CBA agency — that has drawn every Ovni since: the 400 (2019), 370 (2021), 430 (2023) and 490 (2025), plus Alubat's first catamaran, the Mortain & Mavrikios-designed OvniCat 48, launched in 2022.
The Cigale line runs on a separate design lineage. Jean-Marie Finot drew the original Cigales, and the range moved to Marc Lombard's plans in 1994, succeeding the earlier "Lévrier des Mers" boats. The newest Cigale, the swing-keeled Cigale 15 QR, comes from the Finot-Conq studio, and Alubat has announced plans for another new Cigale scheduled for 2027.
Construction through the eras
The lifting keel — the dérive intégrale — was built into the Ovni concept early to let owners reach shallow water, and depending on the boat it raises and lowers by hand or through a hydraulic system. The yard's core materials, aluminum for the hull and deck with lead and cast iron ballast, are fully recyclable. The aluminum grade itself has held steady across generations: Practical Boat Owner identified magnesium-rich 5083 H111 alloy on the 1990s-2010s Ovni 395, and Yacht magazine found the same 5083-series aluminum on the 2020s Ovni 490. The plating and build method have moved more. Yachting Monthly documented a shift to "semi-thick" hulls for the 2023 Ovni 430 — 10mm aluminum on the bottom plate, 8mm on the rest of the hull and 6mm for the deck — in place of the uniform 8mm plate on earlier boats including the 2019 Ovni 400; Yacht magazine separately reported the Ovni 370 introduced a new welding method, built over an auxiliary frame with its frames and stringers installed afterward. Those newest Ovnis, the 370 and 430, also carry a rounded, inverted bow above their chined hulls. Alubat says it has sent more than 1,600 boats out of its workshop since it was founded.
Lines and generations
Over five decades Alubat has offered more than two dozen distinct models, from 25 to 58 feet, organized into three lines. Ovni remains the core: a lifting-keel cruising sloop built for shoal water and long passages, running from the Briand-designed originals through the Vaton- and Joubert-designed exceptions to Lombard's 2018 Ovni 450 and the current Mortain & Mavrikios/CBA generation. Since 2021, Alubat has said, it has undertaken a full renewal of that Ovni range around modern hulls and panoramic saloons, with three models now built on that platform: the 370 (2021), the 430 (2023) and the 490 (2025). The Cigale range runs alongside it as a lighter, faster aluminum ULDB keelboat line, from its 1994 start on Finot's plans to the Finot-Conq-designed Cigale 15 QR. OvniCat, the newest line, opened in 2022 with the Mortain & Mavrikios-designed OvniCat 48, and Alubat has outlined plans for further aluminum catamaran construction.
Who Alubat is for
Alubat built its identity around one proposition: an aluminum hull tough enough to take real abuse, joined to a lifting keel that lets it dry out on a beach or nose into water a fin keel never could. That combination points the brand at sailors planning genuine bluewater and high-latitude passages rather than coastal weekending, and at owners willing to learn a hull material with its own maintenance discipline in exchange for that strength and shoal-draft freedom. It also suits buyers comfortable with a small, specialist yard — one that came close to folding in 2012, was carried for a decade by outside shareholders who simply didn't want it to disappear, and only recently returned to the hands of the people building the boats.
