Universal Marine
sailboat manufacturer
Universal Marine was an American boat builder based in Saint Petersburg, Florida. The company specialized in the design and manufacture of fiberglass sailboats.
The company was founded by Johannes "Jopie" Helsen in 1960 as the Helsen Yacht Corporation.
History
The company was founded as a marina management business and later expanded into boat design and building as a side-business. The first design produced was the Helsen 22 in 1971, followed in 1974 by the Helsen 20. The swing keel Montego 19 and its fixed keel derivative, the Montego 20 were produced first in 1976.
The final and largest boat built, the Montego 25, started production in 1980 and was produced until 1985, with 80 boats completed. In a 2010 review, Steve Henkel wrote about Helsen's Montego 25 design, "this one may have been his best effort ... properly sailed will give good performance on the race course ... We used to race against a Montego 25 in our Morgan 24/25 ...
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Universal Marine” is sailboat manufacturer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Universal, Marine and sailboat, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q108304080. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1971, 1974 and 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “Universal Marine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.