Ovidiu Niculeț, naval architect for small ships and recreational boats

The people of the sea. Talking to Ovidiu Niculeț, Naval Architect for Small Ships and Recreational Boats.

Ovidiu Niculeț is proof of the fact that even here in Romania, we know a little more about boats, about yacht design.

A product of the Galatian school of naval architecture by training, but especially a product of his work and the passion with which he transformed his skills and knowledge into professional performance, Ovidiu represents the binder between the local landscape and the Western method of working in the field of small ships, yachts and boats.

“My profile began to detach itself from that of an ordinary student of naval architecture”

From my perspective, this young designer from Galati is the long-awaited missing link. He brings together on his computer screen, in the boats he designs, the Romanian nautical tradition, as little as many of us believe it, the perseverance and work power specific to these places with the latest software tools and technologies from Western Europe, with the experience of the Dutch, the English and other veterans of the seas in building yachts.

Ever since I met Ovidiu, not many months ago, one thought has dominated me: the regret that I didn’t meet him earlier.

Does your experience or your connection with ships and boats come from before college?

“No, my experience with ships came after college, actually even during college. I can’t help but give credit to Navyk, this small design company, for the fact that I trained there. I got a job at the end of the second year. I came to them through a colleague from college who knew the founders of the company.

Being before summer I decided to go and see what it would be about. I gave an interview in English that didn’t turn out great, but since they desperately needed people and didn’t want to pay too much money, they said: “Let’s try!” That’s how two students got to work in the company, me and another guy. We were office colleagues. And when I say office colleagues, I mean that there was only one office and we both sat at it.

In the last two years of college, I focused less on what I was learning at school, theories like buoy design, which were going to help us very little in our field and more on the problems that arose at work, much more applied and instructive.”

What did this company propose? They opened it to do what?

“The company was founded by a couple, he-Dutch, she-Romanian. He, a carpenter by trade, had initially worked in a Dutch company and then came to Galati to work for a company attached to the shipyard that dealt with interior design for ships.

The company where Steven, the Dutchman, worked also thought of producing a fiberglass boat, a sailboat, a sloop at about 6 m. They thought that if they still have the necessary equipment, because they had an automatic fiberglass beating machine with chopper and others, if they can make bathtubs and shower cabins, why can’t they also make a boat?

But it didn’t work out for them, plus they also had problems with the purchase of the necessary equipment for the boat. At that time, we are talking here about 2008, the main Romanian importer of equipment was the distributor Vetus, but it did not import in stock and then the access to data and information about parts was reduced. In the Netherlands, on the other hand, suppliers also offered 3D models for components, which is why Steven was a good fit as a project manager for this sailboat, being typical, focused on details. He set up the execution process, the work steps, the molds, plus he could keep the correspondence in Dutch with the subassemblies.

He met in that company and married Marlene, the Romanian girl who had studied economics in the field of shipbuilding. After a while, they thought of setting up a company in the naval field in Romania, which they both knew, the idea being based on cheaper labor.

The Faculty of Ships in Galati has nothing to do with the construction of small boats. We have studied a lot in the area of commercial ships, and the transition from 10 mm steel sheet frame elements to 4 mm aluminum sheet for boats, so, to give an example, was difficult. They are completely different areas of expertise, less emphasis is placed on structural quality and more on the quality of the final surface of the boat body.

Going back to our new employment in the company, we were students and didn’t know much about yacht design. The owners of the company could not help us much either, as they were not specialists.

Some of Steven’s friends opened a company there at the same time, in the Netherlands and they were our interface, they took the work there and gave the surplus work to us, we were a kind of buffer for them.

I was using a software called ShipConstructor. The company provided us with a learning system, put in front of us a manual of several thousand pages and some contacts with the software manufacturers and other engineers in the Netherlands that we could still consult when we got stuck. It took us a year to learn, I think until 2007, a year in which we only designed an anchor shaft.

They bought ShipConstructor because it had a pretty good price and worked together with Autocad. This software basically created a kind of database of parts designed in 2D in Autocad and somehow assembled them in the form of a 3D object structure.

It wasn’t necessarily the best performing software at that time, but it allowed you to keep adjusting what you were projecting.

I remembered these days with a colleague that all kinds of hilarious situations appeared at the beginning, for example how they made us design some reinforcements, some 10 by 10 mm braces. You realize that when you cut them in plasma they fell through the car grates and you couldn’t find them anymore. But a zealous designer from the Netherlands zoomed in a lot on the screen and thought they could be put there.”

Going a little further than this moment, what made you choose the Faculty of Ships?

The information you have when you finish high school is limited and your ability to understand it is even more limited. My father was an engineer and my mother was a designer at the ICEPRONAV design institute.

I graduated from CFR High School, the electrotechnical electronics class. Initially, I liked the idea of going to the Faculty of Architecture, but that meant a lot of trips for training and then in college I had to support myself in Bucharest, so for financial reasons I thought about staying in Galati. I thought that naval architecture might resemble civil architecture somewhat, but later I found out that they were completely different things.

So that’s how you got to the ships. From a moment on, you started to like it.

“Well, yes, this is what I was talking about earlier, that starting from the second year onwards, since I started working, my profile began to detach itself from that of an ordinary naval architecture student who finishes college and gets a job at Icepronav or at another very large company with 100-150 designers and sits behind a computer. He takes his piece of a big job, he takes his salary at the end of the month and that’s it.

Maybe it would have been more comfortable for me to go for a choice like this.

Going back to my job, after we learned the program for a year and designed very little, we managed to set up the system. Around that time, an older guy came to us who wanted to build a sailboat. He had had a sailboat before, but it had become obsolete and he wanted a new one, based on the sail plan of the previous one, because he was familiar with it.

Steven came into the office and asked us if we were going to do this project and after thinking about it for a while I said: “Ok, let’s try it!”

Having no experience, we ended up designing that boat in the most complicated way possible, for example we designed the hull in one piece, we worked on it for a whole summer. Now if I started, I would make it from many small strips that I would put together.

The company bought a license for Multi Surf, which is a parametric 3D modeling software. This kind of program helps a lot because if you change an object, let’s say the length, the program modifies all the curves so that everything is kept of a general natural appearance

And that was an interesting period, I was preparing my bachelor’s degree and I worked only a few hours a day at the company. I’d do something in the morning and then I’d go to college, Steven would come in, ruin what I had done and draw differently, I’d come back after that and ruin what he did and out of many iterations of that came out something very good.

The connection with capable people from the outside and all this work was interesting for me, it aroused something in me because not every student had access to these things.”

You had never gone by boat before, your satisfactions, the successes you had in the projects were of a theoretical nature because there were some processes, some curves, some calculations.

“Yes, it was a satisfaction to see that you were taken care of by very capable people in this world of design while your teachers at school ignored you, didn’t explain anything to you and others much more prepared than them answered your emails and phones promptly, you felt that things were coming to you and you don’t have to run after them.

On this sailboat we were also involved in the calculations, not only in the modeling, which gave us confidence.

It was different than on large ships where things are very well regulated by registry rules such as Lloyds, ABS or others, but anyway those who are involved in the project are each specialized in something. Some do the stability part, others do the structure part, some just weight calculations, even if they are all naval architects.

When designing a yacht you have to stick your nose in many more drawers, the activity is much more multidisciplinary than if you were designing a piece of a large ship.

After a while, we had become about six or seven employees, but only Steven and I were in charge of naval architecture, the rest were on the detailing side.

While working, designing and trying to understand and deepen how a small boat works, I began to give it a taste.

Then things advanced, I designed another one of about 21 m somewhere around 2010 and about the same time I started Peter Smith’s boat. He was the owner of RETEC, a large company in Galati that operated next to the shipyard. This guy, also Dutch, had bought a boat of about 22 meters inherited from the border police, built somewhere in 1957.

They bought her from the Netherlands, brought her to Romania in the yard at Navrom and came up with the idea of refitting her and making her a yacht.

We had some challenges with this boat because the owners being people with a lot of money and used to running large companies, they came and punched the table that they wanted things to happen in a certain way, but physics does not always listen to a person’s desire so many could not be done as they wanted.

An example was the fact that it initially had a huge engine, a two-stroke mastodon I think, made of cast iron, extremely heavy. It was tucked in and very deep, down in the hull of the ship. They took it out and put in its place a 300-500 kg Caterpillar, modern engine, much higher power, much less weight. They also raised the deck to make room for the cabins and I explained that it was going to be unstable, which was logical, they had taken something very heavy from the bottom and added new elements somewhere up.

Although my experience was particularly limited, as soon as I had finished college and designed my first yacht, Valliente, I trusted the stability calculation I had made and it didn’t pass.

I told them that they still need to put about three tons of lead in the keel somewhere to balance it, but the owner replied very vehemently that there was no need, that he was not carrying lead with him.

I came to the office and explained to Steven that I have a problem with the client, that he doesn’t understand and I don’t want to assume anything, that he can capsize with the boat and then what do we do?

He, very relaxed, told me I’ll give him an email in which I write that we don’t take responsibility, to express once again what my point of view is and that’s it.

I sent him that email, then the boat was finished but since we had also made the execution drawings, I took care to leave access to the keel area for what I expected to come.

At one point, after it was ready, they went on a trip to Turkey, I think through Antalya and when they came back, they caught worse weather and on a certain type of waves it was tilting a lot, at 40 degrees on each board. They rushed into the port, left them all on shore and then brought the ship to the country in two men. Then they called us: “What do we do with the boat? It’s unstable.” I showed him the email I had sent some time ago and told him: “Look what it says there, we have to put the tons of lead.” They did so and the ship is still going now, I think it’s somewhere in Greece.

That was the first boat where I not only designed but also went with it on the water, I was in the shipyard, I did the tilt tests and other tests.

After about 15-16 years of working in Navyk, I still have the role of a firefighter, I have to intervene to solve problems so at some point, relatively recently, I retired from the company and I continue to work with them but from the outside, as a freelancer.

I only stopped my naval architecture part because that’s what I like the most, although the projects I did at Navyk on naval architecture didn’t sell out the way we would have liked. That’s because Steven has never had much confidence in our part of naval architecture and he doesn’t ask for the money that would be required. He chooses to continue to rely on his drafting, organization, interior design. He sells this part well.”

So the naval architecture part you get from others?

“Yes, at the moment we receive it from Studio Delta in the Netherlands and for sailboats we also work with Owen Clark design from the UK.”

Out of curiosity, how much does a project for a 40-foot sailboat cost approximately?

“Well, I can’t answer how much it would cost depending on the length of the boat.”

But depending on what? complexity?

“Yes, both in terms of complexity and in terms of the client. For example, a first project for a new client costs much more than the second project for the same client.

The clients are different, some have clear ideas and explain: I want the boat this way and others initially imagine what it would be like, then when they see a 3D rendering they change their minds and enter a spiral of changes followed by other changes. So many times the first project we do for a new client doesn’t turn out financially well for the design company.”

But what is the difference between the design part and the naval architecture part? I hear you talk about them as different things.

“The design part is related to the lines of the ship, to the shape, it’s a kind of styling. The naval architecture part takes that shape, the concept and starts iterating from several perspectives such as structure.

Let’s take an extreme case, if I want to put a cabin at the bow, a propeller at the stern and a thin 200 m tube to join them, it’s clear that when you go through the ship beam and stiffness calculations it will fail, the structural calculation will clearly fail and then you start to modify something from that initial concept to meet these calculation criteria.”

You often come across situations like that saying: “Paper supports anything” in the idea that we can draw on paper any nonsense that crosses our minds but it cannot be done physically.

“Yes, to see more than the paper that supports the screen anything… The interaction with customers is complicated, for example I have an Italian client who is a boat pilot and he commissioned us to design a RIB with a cabin. I think I’ve been working on that boat for about a year because it keeps changing its mind. It also seems to him that I don’t know which architect told him that the interior space is not ergonomic, she enlarged the cabin, now he doesn’t like balloons anymore. If the whole process takes a long time, obviously new things appear on the market and he wants those too and it never ends.

Another example is, look, this Dutchman who wants me to design a boat for him. He is basically a welder so he is looking for a well-built but easy to assemble project, this interests him first of all because he is directly involved and knows what it means to work on that boat. You realize what a difference compared to someone who is an amateur or who has never had a boat before.

We come back to your question, precisely for these reasons it is difficult to tell you how much it costs to design a 40-foot sailboat.”

Maybe you remember some examples?

For a sailboat of, say, 16 meters, the design of the hull would be somewhere around 20,000 euros, maybe a little more, the complete project, including installations, to which is added the mast and the execution project. The mast is usually designed by someone else, there are some special software for this calculation and for the building kit, there you need a company like Navyk because it involves many hours of labor to detail each hole, each hinge of each cabinet.

How do you approach a new project in which theoretically you have the freedom to go in a multitude of directions, forms, technical solutions?

“Indeed, in projects where there are fewer constraints and I am given a free hand it is somewhat harder.

There is the type of client who builds a boat for himself and there he tells you directly if he likes what came out and what he still wants modified and it is completely different when you design for someone who wants to produce that boat and sell it further, the one who wants to make a series production. He basically puts his business in your hands.

At the moment, most of the clients we work with make the boats to sell them.”

Make your own boat or think again!

You have to be up to date with the market, with what people are looking for.

“Yes, basically you have to be in the market trend but you also have to be original at the same time, which is sometimes mission impossible. Look, for example, in the case of my boats…”

Well, let’s talk a little about your boats! I understand that you are getting ready to enter the market with a new model of aluminum fishing boat. What will it be called?

The model will be called Archer 510, it is dedicated to spinning fishing, with a bow and stern deck.

I have seen that in Romania this niche of 5-6 meter aluminum boats, the optimal size for the Danube, is covered in principle by imports from Ukraine or in the past, Russia. Because of the taxes, they ended up costing 20-28,000 euros without an engine, basically a boat with a windshield and a few storage boxes.

Maybe you can find a Linder, of Western production, a little lower, around 18,000 euros plus VAT, but I want to get mine in an area of maximum 12-15,000 euros and much better equipped than the ones we are talking about.

I started and designed it about two years ago. Since I was buying the sheet metal from the Netherlands, I thought that, rather than bringing the sheets, cutting them and welding them here, I would better bring the boats directly to the peridock ready welded and do here only the equipment part. So I contracted cutting and welding to the Netherlands.

Lately I’ve been very busy with the design part and I haven’t had much time to deal with the completion and assembly of the boats.

If there are some of those who read this material who need design services, either for a new boat or for modifications to the existing boat, can they turn to you?

“It is possible, this is what I practically do now at Navyk, outfitting or refitting. For example, I am working on a sailboat launched in 2018 where the owners have the feeling that the bowsprit is too fragile and they want some reinforcements, plus that it is retractable, they want to fix it, the anchor support must be mounted on it and the stern we have to add a pair of winches for the runner.”

There are frequent situations in which after launching a boat, after going out a few times with it, the new owners find that they still need various modifications or additions of equipment.

In this case, do you have to repeat the calculations taking into account this change?

“Yes, I repeat some calculations but I try to keep it to the minimum necessary, I usually do some local resistance calculations because it takes a long time and costs a lot to repeat all the calculations.

We are also discussing with other partners involved, for example in the case of the sailboat above, with the rigging manufacturers because sometimes warranty problems also arise.”

What would be the ideal project that you would enjoy participating in, if a new client came through the door, what would you like them to ask of you?

“I would like to design another sailboat but I would like to work on it as a team, to be at least two people. When there are more people who are passionate about what they do, things become more dynamic, ideas appear, we learn from each other, a certain synergy appears.”

About how big should the boat be?

“About in the 18-20 m area because in that area you also have room to make some nice cabins.

For larger sailboats it’s nice but it’s very complicated, you need a big team.

Speaking of large sailboats, in my early days in design, after I refit the Albatros, that old motorboat, I went the following year on a delegation to the Netherlands to take care of a sailboat over 50m.

The fairing was made in Turkey from laminated wood. The ship had come with an iron keel that the Dutch, when they saw it, threw it directly into the scrap metal.

The project came to Navyk and I had to go there to redo the weight calculation for the new keel. They had the weight of the body because they knew it since he came on the barge from Turkey, but then with all the equipment they had installed, he didn’t give them the calculation of weights, they had to calculate how much lead to pour into the keel and where. I had to spend about two months in the double bottom of the ship, I sat and inventoried absolutely every screw that was not inserted in epoxy to calculate the new weight distribution.

There were extraordinarily good people in the field, it was an atmosphere that I liked very much, in which you felt appreciated.”

Other moments in your career that are worth telling?

I also have some stories on the funny side. In 2012 we designed some Search and Rescue ships for a Russian client. He intended to sell them to the state. Now he’s somewhere in Thailand because he left after the war started.

He built a prototype and went out to sea trials. The ship had two fairly powerful engines connected to jet thrusters. They were installed with the help of elastic couplings that had very large bolts, thick screws inserted through rubber elements.

His boys on the construction site forgot to tighten the screws. In the tests, he was going at full power and at one point his screws jumped but they couldn’t jump completely, they tore off, hit the bottom of the ship, the jet thruster broke in two and made a hole in the hull of about 40 cm. The hull was made of aluminum. Left with only one functional propellant, he had the inspiration to give it maximum forward gear and propelled it with his nose to an island that was in the middle of the river where they did the tests because otherwise it would go to the bottom.

The second funny story is also about this boat. It had to be resistant to roll over, when it tilted over a certain angle and the engine vents entered the water, it had a mechanism that closed the intake hatches and had to stop the engine.

After the first test in which they were to sink, after solving the problem with the destroyed jet, the sea tests began again.

At such an exit in the tests, the system that was supposed to close the engine flaps was involuntarily triggered but did not cut off the engine supply.

So the engines were running at full speed, the air intake flaps were closed and some whistles began to be heard near the cheds in the boat and those in the cabin began to rattle their eardrums.

The skipper, when he turned to the door to see what was happening, the door tore off its hinges and flew over him, broke his hand and broke his head, fortunately he recovered completely afterwards. The cabin had practically been emptied, the two enormous engines were drawing air from inside through the air conditioning duct that had broken from the pressure.

What is your greatest professional satisfaction so far?

“I think the greatest satisfaction was when I started my own company and left Navyk where I had worked for over 15 years. I got a job there as a cartoonist and resigned from the position of director. Now I continue to work with them but on my own company, as a subcontractor.

There were also satisfactions of a more technical nature, so to speak, such as the fact that in the fourth year I finished designing the first sailboat, Valliente, which is still sailing, compared to my colleagues who were struggling to design a buoy.

Another satisfaction was when I told Peter Smith that if he didn’t do like me, put lead in the keel, he would capsize with the boat and he ended up agreeing with me.”

The engineering practiced by Ovidiu Niculeț in its most advanced form – design, in a traditional and futuristic field such as ships, yachts, can give rise to only one type of reaction on our part: to bow with admiration when we meet international professional success.