The filing
On 6 July, Kadey-Krogen Yachts filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. Chapter 7 is the liquidation track: the company is wound down, its assets sold, and the business closed for good. A Chapter 11 filing would have kept it trading while it restructured; Kadey-Krogen took the exit. The board had authorised the move four days earlier, on 2 July, by written consent.
Two affiliates went down the same day: KKY Holdings, the parent company, and American Tugs, a smaller-boat brand Kadey-Krogen had bought only in May 2023. President and chief executive Jock Tucker West signed the petition. No statement came from the company or its leadership, and the website stayed live, carrying no notice to customers.
Fifty years of trawlers
Art Kadey, a marine engineer, and Jim Krogen, a naval architect, started the business in 1977. Over nearly half a century the name came to mean one thing in particular: the long-range, full-displacement trawler — a boat built to cross oceans slowly and in comfort, with hand-fitted teak and cherry joinery meant to feel like a home rather than a boat.
Around 700 yachts were built over the brand's life, from 36 to 60 feet. The Krogen 42 was the signature model: 206 hulls over 22 years, the best-seller that defined the marque and still turns up on brokerage listings around the world. This was a semi-custom operation, maybe ten to fifteen boats a year, dependent on a steady trickle of well-heeled buyers who wanted exactly that kind of yacht.
Ownership had changed hands more than once. The founders held it until 2006, when a group led by John Gear, Larry Polster and Tom Button took over. A 2021 recapitalisation brought in growth-equity money and installed West as chief executive. That was the structure carrying the debt when sales began to slide.
The numbers behind it
The court filings show how fast it came apart. Revenue was about $14.96 million in 2024, slipped to $10.11 million in 2025, and by the July filing had fallen to $403,962 for 2026. Assets came to roughly $2.26 million against liabilities of about $2.48 million. Cash on hand was zero.
The largest creditor says a lot about how the business actually worked. Kadey-Krogen was an American marque, but its hulls were built in Taiwan by Asia Harbor Yacht Builders — now owed around $1.53 million, the single biggest claim in the case. The list runs on from there: Hinckley is owed $50,000, Multi-Tech Marine Services about $36,000. More than a hundred creditors in all.
Buyers left in limbo
The people with the most to lose are the ones who ordered a boat. Court papers list contracts at every stage: yachts still under construction, finished hulls waiting to ship from Taiwan, and one boat not yet started. Those buyers now stand in line as unsecured creditors, behind the yard and the banks. Deposits, half-built yachts, the factory warranty, the spare-parts supply — all of it is suddenly uncertain.
That is the part the rest of the trawler world will read closely. The long-range passagemaker niche is small, capital-heavy and slow to turn over, and Kadey-Krogen carried fifty years of goodwill and one of the most respected names in it. It still ran out of road inside eighteen months of falling sales. For a builder whose whole promise was that its boats would look after you a thousand miles from anywhere, ending with no cash and yachts stranded in a Taiwanese yard is a hard last chapter.
