At the Cannes Yachting Festival, held 8 to 13 September, Bulgarian builder Omaya Yachts paid for berth PAN 071 in the Vieux Port and spent the whole show in front of an empty berth. The Omaya 50 is built and launched, but it never left the yard at Silistra: the Danube, the only route from the yard to the sea, was too shallow to sail. Co-founder and general manager Kaloyan Radulov gave his interview to Marine Industry News from the stand, with the empty berth behind him.
Even a 160 cm draft could not get down the river
The yard is at Silistra in north-east Bulgaria. The company has 15,000 m² of production space. It traded as Elica Yard until 12 February 2026, when the owner, family-run Elica Group, renamed it Omaya Yachts. The yacht brand itself dates from 2024. Every hull built there leaves by the same route — downstream to Cernavodă, through the canal to Constanța, into the Black Sea, through the Bosphorus and into the Mediterranean. Nothing 8.4 m wide goes by road. The river is the only exit.
"The levels are very low. Our draft – with the propeller and everything – is around 160cm, and there are some sections of the river that we have to go through that are around two metres," Radulov told Marine Industry News. Sandbanks sit in those same stretches. "We decided to not navigate through."
Marine Industry News puts the two seasons side by side: last year Omaya launched its boat at plus 280 cm, this year at minus 80. The magazine does not specify the gauge, so the readings cannot be tied to an official station.
Not every cruise ship made it down the Danube this summer
Europe's drought pushed the river to record lows in July and August. The Budapest gauge read 23 cm on 30 July, under the 33 cm record set in 2018. Flow at the grounding site was 1,650 m³/s against a normal figure of about 4,700. Some barges sailed with 15 to 20 per cent of their usual cargo, and two nuclear plants on the river, Cernavodă in Romania and Paks in Hungary, powered reactors down over cooling water.
On 28 July at around 02.20 the Viking Cruises longship Viking Ullur grounded on a sandbank at river kilometre 817, opposite the village of Gomotartsi, 25 km upstream of Vidin, with 186 passengers and 52 crew aboard. MS Vivaldi was sent to take people off, but the ship could not get close enough; a Bulgarian Border Police patrol boat took off all 186 passengers, nobody hurt.
What next? Genoa
The catamaran is announced as an entry at the 66th Salone Nautico in Genoa, 1 to 6 October. "Whoever is a serious buyer, they will come to Genoa for sure," Radulov says. He names the risk himself: "After we pass [the] Black Sea, and we go to the Mediterranean, there is a big chance of storms and bad weather. So I hope that we don't send all our leads to Genoa, and then we are stuck in the middle of the trip somewhere." There is no information on where the boat is now or whether she will make Genoa in time.
Still, the yard put its time in Cannes to some use: it presented its next project, the Omaya 53, with a launch date of 2028. It grows out of the 50, and the extra length goes into living space.
All of it rests on one article, Marine Industry News of 16 September. Omaya has issued no press release, and no other outlet has run the story. The figures are the yard's own, as Radulov gave them.
Photo: Marine Industry News. Source: Marine Industry News, BTA, The Maritime Executive, Fortune.
