Kadey-Krogen

On July 6, 2026, Kadey-Krogen Yachts filed a voluntary Chapter 7 petition in Delaware and stopped, forty-nine years in. The numbers in the filing tell the story with no adjectives: roughly $14.9 million of revenue in 2024, $10.1 million in 2025, and $403,962 of 2026 by the day the petition landed. A designer page that starts at the liquidation is starting honestly, because every Krogen afloat is now a boat whose builder cannot take the call — and because, unusually, that may matter less here than for any other yard on this site.

The founding is the industry's favorite napkin story: Miami, 1977, yacht broker Art Kadey across a table from naval architect Jim Krogen, who sketched on notebook paper the boat that became the Krogen 42 — a full-displacement trawler with the seakeeping manners of a North Sea fishing boat and the interior of a proper home. It went around oceans at seven-and-a-bit knots on one economical engine, 206 of them over twenty-two years, some 700 hulls across the range, and it acquired what nobody plans: a congregation. PassageMaker built half a magazine on these boats. The congregation is why the boats carry a price premium decades on — a thirty-five-year-old 42 in respected condition still asks serious six figures, which is the cult made liquid — and it is also the support network the bankruptcy did not touch. The engines are commodity diesels, the systems are ordinary, and the owners' groups were always the real parts desk. What died in Delaware is the new-boat warranty; the 1988 boat never had one.

The survey list is settled canon on the forums: teak decks screwed down over the core, which leak when the bungs and caulk are neglected; steel fuel tanks that can weep at the seams; some hull blistering, usually cosmetic. The hulls themselves are not the problem — even the critics concede Krogens have good bones under bad decks.

Scout watches 18 live Kadey-Krogen askings, averaging $637,633, and publishes 1 across 1 of the yard's models, 1988, asking $69,000.

On this brand a cheap boat is a loud signal, and worth a long look for exactly that reason:

Buy one if the dream is crossing oceans slowly with the fuel bill of a sedan, and price the decks and tanks into the offer. Walk away if you need twenty knots, or if you need a factory behind the phone. The displacement faithful and their faster heretics share the motoryacht shelf, and the whole fleet is on the powerboat shelf.

Sources: Trade Only Today, Kadey-Krogen to Liquidate; Boating Industry on the July 2026 Chapter 7 filing; Kadey-Krogen's own company history; PassageMaker; Trawler Forum, KK 42 Issues to Look For.