Kadey-Krogen sailboats for sale

Buying a used Kadey-Krogen: a trawler builder's outlier sailboat

A used Kadey-Krogen sailboat means one boat: the Krogen 38, a cutter that naval architect James S. Krogen designed for himself rather than for the company's usual trawler buyers. That origin matters for a buyer. This isn't a production sailing line backed by a fleet of sister models - it's a small, personal-project run from a yard that otherwise built passagemaking trawlers, put out by a company no longer in business. Buying one means weighing an individual hull's condition and history more than leaning on brand infrastructure.

Which era to target

Chien Hwa Boat Builders turned out the 38 for about a decade, starting in the early 1980s and tapering off by the early 1990s - somewhere around eighty-five boats in total, a genuinely limited population to shop from. A dealer review of the boat flagged a pattern common to early-1980s Taiwan-built boats: the first hulls off the line were not finished as well as later ones, with the yard's technique improving as the run went on. That points toward favoring a later-production hull where the choice exists, and asking pointedly about build date when comparing two candidates.

What to inspect across the range

Two features of the 38's construction are worth confirming on any hull under consideration. Jordan Yachts' review of the boat noted it was built in two distinct keel configurations - one with a tandem centerboard and encapsulated lead ballast, one with a deep keel and iron ballast - so establishing which one a given boat carries, and inspecting that ballast and its attachment, belongs early in any survey. The hull itself was hand-built in closed-cell foam-cored fiberglass, laid up in mat and roving rather than to a single fixed standard across the run, which is the same throughline behind the early-versus-late production distinction above. The rudder is fiberglass and skeg-hung, worth a look at the skeg and its fastenings given the boat's age.

Navigating the lineup

There's no lineup to navigate in the usual sense - the 38 is Kadey-Krogen's only sailboat, so the real choice sits between the two keel configurations and between an earlier or later hull within that single design's run. A tandem-centerboard boat trades some of a deep keel's simplicity for shoal-draft access; a deep-keel boat trades that access for a more conventional sailing setup. The full model directory on this page breaks the two down in full.