La Conner, Wash., sits about an hour north of Seattle, nestled amid Fidalgo Island’s tulip fields and across the Swinomish Channel from the Swinomish Reservation. This boatbuilding hub with stunning views of Mount Baker has been home to American Tug for a quarter century. Even after a recent expansion, the builder’s order book runneth over. Seven boats were finished in 2023, with another 10 poised to launch this year. The yard has around 33 employees with aspirations for 45 to 48 skilled workers.
“This is a good old-fashioned American success story,” says American Tug General Manager Troy Olason. “There’s something very simple and wonderful about that.”
President and co-founder Kurt Dilworth says the company’s mission—to produce robust, semi-displacement trawlers—remains unchanged since the Kadey-Krogen Group acquired American Tug in 2023. He wants each boat to offer the same experience for its first, third and fourth owner, and he wants owners to know that customizations are possible. “We’re approachable,” he says. “Some of that comes from being a small, boutique builder.”
Origin Story
American Tug’s roots are intertwined with the region’s commercial fishing heritage, Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, and naval architect Lynn Senour. Among Senour’s many projects was a stout, 34-foot commercial fishing boat that American Tug credits as spawning its line of recreational trawlers.
“I had met Lynn through another friend of mine in a previous world where I worked down in Ballard at a shipyard,” says Dilworth, who studied engineering at the University of Washington between yard gigs. Senour and Dilworth became friends. After Dilworth graduated, Senour persuaded him to “go talk to the guys” at Nordic Tugs, where he landed a job.
It was in the Nordic Tugs factory that American Tug would be born. Dilworth met yard co-founders Tom Nelson and Mike Schoppert there. “We all basically started around the same time in the mid-’90s and grew to understand each other’s philosophies and our synergies,” Dilworth says.
The trio teamed up with Senour to form Tomco Marine Group LLC, the original parent company of American Tug. Their mission was to design top-of-the-line pleasure craft based on the rugged, reliable hulls used in the Alaska salmon fishery. Their first design, the American Tug 34 (now known as the 365), was based on Senour’s 1999 commercial fishing hull.
“That was in January of 2000,” Dilworth says, adding that it remains the builder’s most successful model, with 165 hulls built to date. Today, American Tug offers two models, the 362 and 365, that are based on the hull and deck of Hull No. 1 of the 34. The yard also builds a longer 395 with the same beam, and a fully larger flagship, the 435.
Dilworth calls the 395 a “Swiss Army knife” with two staterooms and a 500-hp option that reportedly produces a 20-knot cruising speed.
From its onset, American Tug has designed its boats to be self-sufficient, off-grid and all-weather. Systems are selected and installed for DIYers to handle. There’s no exterior wood to maintain. The smaller size range aims to maximize versatility and usability, with a “big little ship” ethos meant for owners to leave the dock on a whim.
While the production builds are standard, each hull has a degree of customer modifications. “Every boat has had some customization,” Dilworth says. “Every boat may have the next model year adjustment. That’s kind of what makes the boats unique in our clients’ minds. They had their say. They got their own custom thing that nobody else has.”
The process, Dilworth adds, is just as personal to the craftsmen at the yard as it is to the boat buyers. “They are artists. They’re not machines. And so, everyone takes, I think, another level of pride in the product that you may not find on an assembly line somewhere else. … Our employees are building an entire boat from start to finish, and it’s exciting to see a boat roll out the door. And we even take [time] to show the employees the finished product, walk ’em through, and see it on their face how excited they are going home at night saying, ‘I build American Tugs.’ I think that’s what keeps me coming every day too.”
Olason says the idea is to create a culture where American Tug gets better every single day. “Let’s get better every week, every month,” he says. “Boat by boat.”
Overcoming Obstacles
That culture has been hard-earned. Senour died in the mid-2000s after helping to develop the 435 model. After that, the company developed the 395 and 485, in addition to two prototypes called the 49 Limited Edition. “We did a 395 twin-engine boat, the only twin-engine American Tug ever to exist. All the rest are single-engine,” Dilworth says. “The 34 became the 365. It’s just a name change. It was a single-stateroom boat, and in 2020, we introduced our 362, which is exactly the same as the original hull we introduced in 2000 except it has two staterooms.”
By 2007, the company had produced the most boats ever out of the La Conner facility, 23 of them, with 60 to 70 employees. Then, the Great Recession hit. “We were down to six employees and one boat in the shop for 2008, 2009,” Dilworth says. “It was a traumatic experience for all of America, and specifically, the recreational boat and RV industries took a huge hit.”
American Tug never stopped operations or missed a rent payment, Olason says, but it took a long time to get back to a normal building cycle. And then, there was the Covid-19 pandemic. State mandates shuttered the facility for more than a month, with just a skeleton crew. But no employees were lost before the pandemic’s boat-buying boom set in.
“What can you do during lockdown?” Dilworth says. “You can’t travel internationally. You can’t go on a plane. But you can go on your boat and get as far away from everyone as possible. And we just had the perfect vessel for that. We are an off-grid, go-anywhere type of a product.”
The pandemic’s supply-chain strains were a problem, but again, American Tug persevered. Then, in May 2023, the Kadey-Krogen Group bought Tomco Marine Group. “We were a small company with big dreams,” Dilworth says. “Sometimes those big dreams need a little help, and so we found ourselves in a position where we wanted to continue growing, but we needed help to get there.”
Dilworth says that people and philosophies align nicely in the new company structure. “We’re not a boat that you see sitting at the dock,” Dilworth says. “People that buy our boats, both American Tugs and Kadey-Krogens, are people who are not afraid to go explore.”
Post-acquisition, Dilworth adds, American Tug still has the “same building with exactly the same product, but now with the support of their entire sales force, which is now out there promoting our product along with theirs. Our shared resources both from engineering to interior design work and then hopefully, at some point, assembly and building expertise will start to mesh. Who knows what that’ll bring?”
Olason, a third-generation boater, says Dilworth is not just the boss, but is instead an integral part of the build process. “The last quality-control person that we have before a boat leaves is the founder of the company,” Olason says. “He’s our engineering department.”
Dilworth says the situation is fine by him: “I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years, and I still come to work and go, ‘Who has a cooler job than I do?’ Messing around in boats. Can’t beat it.”
This article was originally published in the March 2024 issue.
