Why an Ovni?
It is no secret, I love my Ovni. I fell in love with Ovnis in a beautiful anchorage in Portugal – Sagres, just inside Cape St Vincent. I was sailing in Cooya (http://classicyachtinfo.com/yachts/cooya/) with my long term sailing buddy Mike and we came in after a long haul down the Portuguese coast. There quietly at anchor was an Ovni – it was love at first sight. Modern, yet not extreme, intensely practical but not ugly. I determined to own one one day.
What I did not fully appreciate at the time was the extraordinary versatility of the concept. Ovnis have sailed the world, yet are prefect for nosing up drying creeks, taking chances in shoal waters that would be unthinkable in deep keel yachts. And in extremis, they are made of aluminium, a strong, but more importantly tough material. Bang an Ovni hard and you get an unsightly dent, but that’s it. One day you can get around to knocking it out, meantime life goes on. No need to slip for repairs, no worry about water getting into laminates, rust starting or wood soaking up water.
There are many other benefits of aluminium, but I won’t rehearse the big ones here. Try https://www.morganscloud.com for the full story.
But I cannot resist a few that I did not expect. I knew that being aluminium there would not be the problems of what you might call encapsulated structures – gel coat protected GRP, epoxy protected wood epoxy construction and paint protected steel. So long as you can live with imperfect paint, there is nothing to worry about the aluminium. After all, the real purists only paint the bottom so that anti-foul will stick and the decks so the crew will stick.
What this means is that I do not worry to much about the condition of the seabed when drying out. Obviously big rocks are a bad idea, but small stuff is not a problem. This in turn means that I will take more risks and so get into places that I might otherwise miss.
At a practical level, because aluminium scarcely corrodes it means that there are no rust stains from grinding, tapping or cutting. It is also easy to tap, so adding small fittings, vital for an inveterate tinkerer like me, is a breeze, with no mess afterwards or need for fiddly touch up paint.
Sailing performance
So far as I can tell from sailing alongside similar length modern yachts, my Ovni 32 Rosi holds her own off the wind. While she is stiff enough to power upwind, the swept, flat plate centreboard is not the best of foils, so there she does start to lose out. But in flat water with new sails I measured a tacking angle of 90 degrees (measured from GPS track sailing in the tideless IJsselmeer), which is not bad. I am no purist, so if she is struggling I add a bit of engine. It does not take much to make a world of difference – the limitation usually being me as she drops off waves with a bang. Being aluminium, no problem for the boat, but wearing for mere humans.
I had new sails made not long after I got her. (Vectron from Kemps – highly recommended). I made sure that the clew of the mainsail was high to keep it clear of heads in the cockpit and there is not a lot of overlap on the jib (which also has a high clew so I can see where I am going). It also has reefing foam inserts, so sets well even when down to 50% area. For extreme conditions – not experienced yet I am pleased to say, I have a very flat small jib that sets on a dismountable inner forestay, which has spent all its life tied to the mast.
Stability
A thing that seems to worry people a lot about Ovnis is the ultimate stability – the angle at which the righting moment goes to zero. There is reassurance about the feeling of having a lump of lead or cast iron hung below a boat, but what actually matters is the height of the centre of gravity of the boat. A wide boat with a relatively light keel will generally have good initial stability, but poor ultimate (large angle stability). A narrower boat, with a lot of ballast that need not all be in the keel may not be so stiff initially but potentially has better large angle stability. Ovnis are more like the second variation. I have done an inclining test (the way that naval architects determined the initial stability and centre of gravity of a vessel) and also done some rather simple calculations of stability at 90 degrees and 120 degrees. The result is an angle of vanishing stability of 120 degrees – which is a typical figure for many modern yachts.
Interestingly, this number may be higher for a small Ovni like Rosi because she has proportionally more freeboard than the larger models, and freeboard has a strong influence on the ultimate stability.
Life saving gadgets
Modern navigation with GPS and a plotter or computer based system is a revelation and AIS means that my heart is no longer in my mouth as ships approach. But for ditch crawling and confined spaces, there are two other things I find indispensable:
Google Earth and other satellite imagery and the live position fixes you can get on a phone.
A range finder. This may sound like an unnecessary toy, but I have always found it very difficult to judge distances in confined anchorages. Generally things are further away than they look, but it is good to know exactly how far they are and compare that with the anchor scope.
And for those moments when I start to fret about the engine or gearbox running hot, a hand held temperature sensor is a bonus.
There is a gallery of photos here