Pegasus sailboats: one name across three unrelated builders
On the used-sailboat market, "Pegasus" names three companies that never worked together, plus a dinghy design connected to neither. Rydgeway Marine Ltd, later trading as Pegasus Yachts Ltd, built GRP cruisers at Oulton Broad in Lowestoft, England, from the late 1970s into the early 1990s before closing; its lineup included the Pegasus 700 and Pegasus 800, plus the lesser-known Pegasus Pirate 17 (also called the Express Pirate) and Pegasus Prelude 19. Unconnected to that yard, Pegasus Yachts d.o.o. is a contemporary boutique builder in Izola, Slovenia, building the carbon-and-glass Pegasus 50 and developing a larger sister ship, the Pegasus 67. And separate from both companies, "Pegasus" is also the name of a 14ft6in dinghy that Uffa Fox drew in 1958 — a home-build kit design with no connection to either yacht-building company. A model number tells a buyer which Pegasus they are looking at: 700, 800, Pirate 17, or Prelude 19 point to the defunct British yard; 50 or 67 point to Slovenia; 14 points to the Uffa Fox dinghy.
Origins and ownership
Rydgeway Marine built most of the Lowestoft designs, later continuing production under the Pegasus Yachts Ltd name at Oulton Broad; when the Northern Rivers Sailing Club formed in 1987, Pegasus Yachts presented the new club with its Inaugural Salver, a sign of the builder's local standing that year. The company built more than 400 vessels in total before closing; it is no longer in business.
Pegasus Yachts in Slovenia was established by three partners, including Miha Breskvar and Marko Paš. Breskvar had previously co-founded and managed a company called FrodX d.o.o. and used his sailing background to teach more than 500 people to sail. Paš spent 25 years designing and building boats, cruising and racing across the Mediterranean, North Sea, and Baltic, and competed as crew in the Tornado catamaran class at the 2004 Athens Olympics; before Pegasus, he was responsible for developing the Shipman carbon yachts, a line of five models and 44 boats among the first serially produced carbon performance cruisers. Seahorse Magazine describes the resulting company as a "Slovenian boutique boatbuilder."
The Uffa Fox dinghy has no comparable corporate history — Fox was commissioned in 1958 to design it, and it was sold as a home-build kit rather than a factory product.
The designers
Gordon V. Harris designed both the Pegasus 700 and Pegasus 800 for the British builder. Uffa Fox's brief for the dinghy, by his own account, was to "design the best 14ft water-line dinghy you can"; the CVRDA's record places the resulting hull halfway between two other Fox designs, the Firefly and the Swordfish (on which the Albacore was later based). For the Pegasus 50, the design is Marko Paš's own; for the larger Pegasus 67, Paš brought in naval architect Juan Kouyoumdjian as design partner, and the pair have been testing and shape-optimizing keel configurations using Juan Yacht Design's in-house CFD cluster.
Construction through the eras
The British-built 700 and 800 are GRP boats across a single company's Rydgeway Marine and Pegasus Yachts Ltd eras. The Uffa Fox dinghy went through more than one construction method: it was originally sold as a home-build kit supplied by Bell Woodworking, the first round-bilge boat designed for that purpose; by the mid-1960s those kits were phased out in favor of composite wood-and-glassfibre construction, and production eventually moved to all-glassfibre boats before ending in 1971, with only 250 officially registered. Slovenia's Pegasus 50 is built differently again: a hybrid carbon-and-glass-fibre hull, vacuum infused to reduce weight and keep the hull slippery, with hulls laminated in Italy before being fitted out at Pegasus's own yard near Izola.
Lines and generations
The British yard's range centered on the 700 and 800, alongside the less-documented Pirate 17/Express Pirate and Prelude 19. The Uffa Fox dinghy was a single one-design, produced from 1959 to 1971. Slovenia's line began with the Pegasus 50 — its first hull splashed in 2020, and a third hull went on to win the 2022 OSTAR singlehanded transatlantic race — with more than twenty since built and sailing worldwide, in the Mediterranean, the United States, and the Baltic. A larger sister ship, the Pegasus 67, is in development alongside Kouyoumdjian.
Who Pegasus is for
Because the name spans three unrelated builders, matching a buyer to "the" Pegasus depends entirely on which one is in front of them. The British 700 and 800 suit someone drawn to a modest, GRP-era cruiser from a shuttered yard with a genuine local following on England's Broads. The Uffa Fox dinghy, scarce at only 250 built, is a one-design for a sailor after a piece of Fox's design lineage rather than a common class fleet. And the Slovenian Pegasus 50 targets a different buyer altogether: someone after a contemporary, carbon-built performance cruiser proven on races like the OSTAR and already sailing in cruising grounds from the Mediterranean to the Baltic to the United States.
