Kadey-Krogen sailboats: a trawler builder's one sailing design
Kadey-Krogen Yachts built its name on full-displacement passagemaking trawlers, not sailboats. The Krogen 38 is the exception - the personal dream boat of naval architect James S. Krogen, one of the only sailboats he ever drew for himself rather than for a trawler buyer. Understanding the 38 means understanding the trawler company built up around it.
Origins and ownership
Company lore places Kadey-Krogen's founding in 1977, though earlier accounts trace its start to 1976, when Florida yacht broker Art Kadey approached naval architect James S. Krogen with an idea for a rugged, liveaboard trawler he wanted for himself. The two had met a few years earlier, after Kadey started a yacht brokerage in Coconut Grove, Florida, in the early 1970s. Krogen, born in 1928 in Manistee, Michigan, already carried three decades of commercial design experience into the partnership. Their collaboration produced the Krogen 42, launched in 1977 on primitive early Taiwan molds and designed for buyers who preferred timeless looks and passagemaking range to speed. It became the company's most popular model, with 206 built over 22 years.
Art Kadey was killed in 1981, shot in a Miami parking-lot robbery after intervening to help a couple being held up. James S. Krogen's son Kurt quickly stepped into Kadey's role overseeing the company's Taiwan production. Krogen himself kept leading the company's design work until his own death in December 1994, at 66, of a heart attack. From 1995, ownership passed to Krogen family members and business partners, with sons Kurt and Jimmy Krogen central to carrying the brand forward; the family moved the company to Stuart, Florida, in the late 1990s. Ownership changed again in the mid-2000s, when the Krogen family sold the company to a group of boating enthusiasts, and by 2017 Larry Polster, Tom Button and Tucker West were named as the principals leading Kadey-Krogen. The company bought American Tug, based in La Conner, Washington, in May 2023, and by the time of its later bankruptcy filing was headquartered in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, having relocated over the years from its original Florida base. Kadey-Krogen entered 2026 preparing to mark its 50th anniversary and introduced the all-new Krogen 53 that May, but the anniversary went unmarked: on July 6, 2026, the company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy along with American Tug.
The designer
James S. Krogen was best known within the company for trawlers, but he was, by his own telling, more of a sailor at heart, and his dream boat was a sailboat. The Krogen 38 - one of the only sailing designs he ever drew - was it. Naval architect and reviewer Bob Perry wrote that Krogen designed the 38 for himself and had it built in Taiwan, its features honed over the years to near perfection. Krogen described the boat, in his own words, as designed for "the most ornery, knitpicking, demanding, hypercritical client I've ever had - me."
Construction through the eras
Kadey-Krogen's trawlers were built almost entirely by one yard: Asia Harbor Yacht Builders, owned by the Lin family of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, the company's exclusive builder for decades. Early hulls, including the Krogen 42's, were hand laid up in fiberglass mat and roving over a closed-cell PVC foam core, construction that resembled the commercial shrimp trawlers of the era. Manufacturing moved early to Taiwan, and by 1991 the company's trawlers were being built at a purpose-built facility in Kaohsiung.
The Krogen 38 sailboat, by contrast, came from a different Taiwan yard entirely: Chien Hwa Boat Builders. Jordan Yachts' review of the boat found its earliest hulls not as well built as later ones, as the yard refined its methods over the run; most examples that came later, the review noted, carried a better-quality layup. Per company brochures, the 38's layup was the same closed-cell PVC hand lay-up used on the trawlers. The 38 emerged in the early 1980s and stayed in production into the early 1990s, roughly eighty-five hulls built in all.
Lines and generations
Beyond the 42, Kadey-Krogen answered owner requests for a smaller coastal and inland cruiser with the Manatee 36, of which 99 were built between 1984 and 1991. In 2019 the company introduced Summit Motoryachts, a semi-displacement performance-cruising line aimed at younger owners in a hurry - a departure from the full-displacement trawlers that otherwise define the brand. The Krogen 38 sailboat sits apart from all of it: a single cutter-rigged design, built in two keel configurations, that never grew into a sailing line of its own.
Who Kadey-Krogen is for
Most Kadey-Krogen buyers are trawler people, drawn to a full-displacement passagemaking pedigree that traces back to Art Kadey and James S. Krogen's original partnership. The 38 draws a narrower, different kind of buyer: someone interested less in a production sailing line than in the one sailboat a trawler designer built to please no one but himself.
