The 58-year-old husband and father was somewhere over the Atlantic, flying home from Europe in July, when he heard about the bankruptcy filings. It was Chapter 7, and the liquidation would include Kadey-Krogen Yachts as well as American Tugs, which Kadey-Krogen Group had acquired in 2023.
American Tugs was building the first boat — the first big anything, really — that he had ever ordered brand-new. He’d inked the papers in autumn of 2025 for the American Tug 435 and had made about 40% of the payments, he says. The kids are grown. It was finally time. He was so excited, he and his wife wanted to visit the La Conner, Wash.-based builder for his birthday in August to see the boat’s progress.
“I got this news, and I just was uncontrollably bawling for like a half an hour,” says the man, who asked to remain anonymous. “The whole thing is so suspicious. I don’t even know where it begins or ends. It just doesn’t make any sense. A lot of good people are being royally screwed.”
It now appears that at the time he ordered his boat, the Kadey-Krogen Group was already experiencing problems. Numerous buyers of Kadey-Krogen and American Tugs boats tell Soundings Trade Only they started to see red flags behind the scenes as early as mid-2025. The company’s bankruptcy documents state that Kadey-Krogen Yachts owes more than $1.5 million to Asia Harbor Yacht Builders in Taiwan, dating back to Oct.1, 2025, and that American Tugs owes more than $327,000 in taxes to the Department of Revenue in Olympia, Wash., going back to November 2024.
Tucker West, president and CEO of Kadey-Krogen Group, responded to an interview request via text message: “I am not allowed to speak at this time. I can tell you not to believe everything you hear or read.”
Greg Feighery, who joined Kadey-Krogen Group as CFO in spring of 2024 and more recently was listed online as president of American Tugs, did not respond to a request for comment.
Kurt Dilworth, co-founder and former president and CEO of American Tugs, confirmed by telephone that he left the company in June, adding: “I really don’t have anything to say on the record at this time until the details get worked out.”
Numerous buyers, however, were eager to discuss their experiences. Some say they were led to believe everything was fine with their boat orders, while others say they had been asking questions and raising concerns for more than a year.
“There’s just too many small things,” says Joe Ganete, a former police detective who signed on to buy an American Tug 365 in May 2025 and was told his boat is about 85% complete. “One thing standing alone doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t paint the picture. But when you start adding up the small details and the oddities of the circumstances and the excuses, you start to wonder what’s going on here.”
Another buyer, who also asked to remain anonymous, described signing on for a Krogen 48 AE in October 2024. The couple paid the 20% deposit and stayed in contact with the Kaohsiung, Taiwan-based yard, believing everything was on track with plans to build the boat they’d dreamed about owning for 17 years. Their hull was supposed to be laid up before the end of 2026, for delivery in 2028. They now expect to lose their deposit: “It’s so sad. This was the ultimate boat, in our opinion. Nothing else we like, as well.”
Yet another buyer, Elizabeth Fortunato, says she and her husband put down their deposit on a Krogen 50 Open in March 2024 and realized something was wrong by mid-2025. Fortunato holds a 50-ton captain’s license, hosts The AI Captain’s Log podcast, created the bolo (boaters on the lookout) app to give boaters real-time, crowdsourced information, and has worked with several custom home builders. Her industry knowledge and prior experiences left her concerned after what she describes as a short-term problem escalating to the point that the shipyard was “bullying” her.
She and her husband had originally made a cash payment for the boat, she says. They were in the process of taking out a loan for future payments when, in spring 2025, tariffs became a global concern. Lenders suddenly didn’t want to talk with her about an offshore build, she says, so she told Krogen’s team there would be a delay of a week or two on their summer 2025 payment.
“These are not cheap toys. We had to get other things initially set up,” Fortunato says. “They first told us, ‘We need the money sooner than the contract said.’ We’re like, what?”
The couple made that summer 2025 payment several days late, she says. “Krogen at the time was really pressuring us,” she recalls, “and I said, wait a minute, this doesn’t feel like a partnership anymore. This feels like a badgering, a harassment. … In the back of my head, I’m going, this is a red flag because anybody who argues with you as a business over this kind of thing doesn’t have the liquidity to cover that gap.”
When the next payment date approached in autumn 2025, Fortunato says, Krogen again asked for the money several weeks before the contracted date. “It was a lot of pressure, and I was just like, this does not make sense,” she says. They spoke with West at the Annapolis boat show in October 2025, she recalls, “and he said they had no boats in the pipeline past 2027. He told us that, and I told my husband, ‘This is not good.’ ”
Their boat, Fortunato says, is 100% complete. It was supposed to ship in June from Taiwan. “As we approached that date, I was asking, ‘What’s the container ship it’s on? I want to track it through MarineTraffic,’ ” she says. “My lawyer was reaching out, saying we need to get the paperwork together. And we got zero answers.”
She says Krogen’s team told her they were working on a new ship date. “That was the last communication I had from Tucker, and then it was bankruptcy,” she says. Her payments to Kadey-Krogen are made in full, she says, adding: “The builder is saying Krogen didn’t give them the money,” hence the boat remaining in Taiwan.
Asia Harbor Yacht Builders did not reply to a request for comment.
Ganete, the American Tugs customer, says autumn of 2025 was also notable for him because progress slowed on his boat’s construction. He says his contract was for 90% paid upfront in exchange for a reduced overall price, with a stipulation that if the yard missed the deadline, he would get a full refund.
“The boat was supposed to be delivered in May 2026. Then it was July, and they couldn’t make that,” Ganete says. “Then it was September — obviously it won’t be September. But by then, they were already outside the contract period, so Tucker was in a pickle. By contract, he had to refund us the money 100%, and then all of the sudden, we got the bankruptcy notice.”
Ganete says West gave him two options after he asked for the refund: Keep working with the yard, or get an attorney. “We had an appointment to meet at the factory July 7,” Ganete says. “He changed it to July 9, and then he filed bankruptcy on July 6. So they had promised me, ‘Stay with us, please, we beg of you, we’re going to build your boat.’ They were stringing us along.”
Ganete says he filed a written statement with the Skagit County Sheriff in Washington state: “I truly believe the evidence that I have in writing, the communications with American Tug, it would provide substantial information to pursue charges.”
The Skagit County Sheriff, asked to confirm receipt of Ganete’s information, said the reports had not been given final approval, or the case involved an open, active investigation.
Like several other buyers, Ganete questions why Krogen’s team didn’t acknowledge problems sooner and ask people with boats in the pipeline for help. “I’m sure they had cash flow projections. Maybe a year that was soft with not as many sales as anticipated for 2026,” Ganete says. “Let’s find creative ways to cut overhead or something. Let’s try to keep the company alive.
“Were you in deep financial trouble even when you bought American Tug?” he adds. “Did you buy them because they had a lot of back orders and you wanted to flush them for money? The mind starts to wonder what truly happened.”
The buyer who was midair over the Atlantic when he found out about the bankruptcy also says he finds the situation “really suspicious.”
“It is very rare for companies to go right to Chapter 7. If you look at the numbers, they didn’t have no hope. They have assets. They have a brand. The lawyer said, ‘This makes no sense. You go with Chapter 11 and try to restructure the business.’
“If they had just called me and said, ‘Hey, we’re in some financial straits,’ I would have helped,” he adds. “It’s really, really weird that the company would wind down in this manner.”
