Pegasus sailboats for sale

Buying a used Pegasus: identify the builder before the boat

A listing that says "Pegasus" does not, by itself, tell a buyer much. The name covers three lineages that never worked together: a defunct English GRP cruiser yard, a still-active Slovenian carbon-cruiser builder, and a scarce home-built wooden dinghy design. Get the identification wrong and every downstream judgment — expected construction, available support, even what kind of sailing the boat was built for — ends up applied to the wrong lineage. The model number is the disambiguator: a 700 or 800 (or the rarer Pirate 17 and Prelude 19) points to Rydgeway Marine or its successor, Pegasus Yachts Ltd, of Oulton Broad, Lowestoft; a 50 or 67 points to Slovenia's Pegasus Yachts d.o.o.; a 14 points to the Uffa Fox-designed one-design dinghy, unconnected to either yacht company. Nail that down before weighing anything else, because condition expectations, parts availability, and community support differ by lineage far more than by hull number alone.

Which era to target

A Pegasus 700 or 800 means a British GRP cruiser built between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, first by Rydgeway Marine and later by Pegasus Yachts Ltd — a shuttered builder, so expect no factory support and to lean on the owner community instead. The Pegasus dinghy is older and rarer still: production ran from 1959 to 1971, with construction itself changing partway through — early boats were home-built from Bell Woodworking kits, later ones were composite wood-and-glassfibre, and the final boats were all-glassfibre — so a hull's vintage determines what it is built of. The Pegasus 50 is the newest of the three by decades: Slovenia's carbon-and-glass builder splashed its first hull in 2020 and remains active, with a larger Pegasus 67 still a development project rather than a production model.

What to inspect across the range

The clearest inspection guidance applies to the British 700 and 800 specifically, not to the other two lineages. A UK marine surveyor's review of the 800 notes that many petrol-engined examples will by now have been re-engined, so verifying what engine is actually aboard is worth doing regardless of the logbook. The same era's boats need the upkeep any aging GRP cruiser does: a review of the 700 recommends seasonal servicing of sails, spars, and standing and running rigging, plus interior cleaning and attention to hull and anti-fouling paint on any boat that has sailed saltwater — while noting that engineers report few problems with the 700 beyond ordinary age-related upgrades.

Navigating the lineup

With three unrelated builders under one name, size and era do more to narrow a search than the badge alone: the modest 700 and 800 pocket cruisers from a shuttered English yard, the scarce one-design Uffa Fox dinghy, and Slovenia's contemporary carbon Pegasus 50 sit in entirely separate markets, with no shared parts, dealer network, or owner community between them. The full model directory on this page sorts the range for closer comparison.