Nobiskrug

A Kiel Canal Yard That Became a Superyacht Name

Nobiskrug traces its roots to 1905, when Otto Storck founded the yard in Rendsburg, a town whose shipbuilding trade exists largely because of the Kiel Canal, opened a decade earlier in 1895. The company incorporated as a limited liability concern in 1908 and spent its first years building barges, lighters and pontoons for canal traffic rather than anything resembling a yacht. During the First World War it built minesweepers and auxiliary vessels for the Kaiserliche Marine, and by the interwar years it had found a niche building three-masted schooners and customs cruisers for the German government. The yard survived the Second World War on repair and conversion work, then grew through the 1950s to the 1980s into a builder of ferries and cargo ships, the kind of steady commercial order book that keeps a heavy-steel yard alive but gives it no particular name recognition outside the shipping trade.

That commercial business nearly killed the company. Nobiskrug came to the brink of collapse in 1986, and only a contract to lengthen the cruise liner Berlin kept the yard afloat. Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft (HDW) bought Nobiskrug in 1987, modernised the site and cut the workforce from over 1,200 to around 400, a scale that better matched the actual order book. It was this smaller, retooled yard that eventually pivoted toward superyachts rather than commercial tonnage, a shift completed in the year 2000 with the 92 metre Tatoosh, the yard's first true megayacht and, at launch, reportedly the twelfth largest private yacht in the world. The pivot mattered: it moved Nobiskrug from a regional canal-town shipbuilder into a name that would, within two decades, be building some of the largest and most technically ambitious yachts afloat.

Sailing Yacht A and the Superyacht Years

Tatoosh opened the door, and Nobiskrug spent the next two decades building a reputation on scale and engineering risk rather than volume, the standard German-yard approach of taking on a handful of very large, very complex one-off commissions rather than a production range. The clearest expression of that approach is Sailing Yacht A, the 143 metre three-masted vessel delivered in 2017 for Russian industrialist Andrey Melnichenko, which remains the largest sailing yacht in the world and one of the most recognisable superyacht silhouettes of the last decade. In 2020 Nobiskrug followed with Artefact, an 80 metre hybrid motor yacht built around diesel-electric propulsion and battery storage aimed at cutting fuel burn and emissions, a genuinely early bet on hybrid propulsion at this size rather than a marketing gesture.

Those three yachts, Tatoosh, Sailing Yacht A and Artefact, are the reason Nobiskrug is discussed in the same breath as Lurssen and Blohm and Voss rather than as a minor German yard. They also illustrate the yard's actual business model: it never ran a semi-custom range the way Feadship or Amels do, and every hull leaving Rendsburg was a bespoke commission for a single owner, often delivered under a project number or a placeholder name before being renamed on handover or later resale. That model produces headline-grabbing yachts, but it also means the yard's fortunes rise and fall with a small number of very large contracts rather than a broad order book, a structural fragility that would matter a great deal from 2020 onward.

Two Insolvencies in Four Years

The fragility showed first in April 2021, when Nobiskrug filed for bankruptcy protection, citing pandemic-driven order cancellations among its causes. Flensburger Schiffbau-Gesellschaft (FSG), a fellow German yard, acquired Nobiskrug that July, and by August 2021 the takeover was formally concluded under Lars Windhorst's Tennor Group, which owned both FSG and Nobiskrug from that point. For a few years the combined FSG-Nobiskrug group operated under that ownership, with Nobiskrug continuing to take on new superyacht contracts, including the 80 metre Project Bullseye (Nobiskrug 798), a Winch Design collaboration signed with brokerage Cecil Wright in 2022 for a planned 2025 delivery.

It did not hold. In December 2024 both Nobiskrug and parent company FSG filed for insolvency a second time, and court-appointed administrators Hendrik Gittermann and Christoph Morgen took over the group's affairs. Around 500 employees across FSG-Nobiskrug were affected, roughly 140 of them at the Rendsburg yard itself, and financing to cover wages was secured only through the end of January 2025 while the administrators searched for a buyer. Lurssen submitted a formal takeover offer for Nobiskrug in January 2025, while FSG was separately sold to the family-owned Heinrich Ronner Group, splitting the two yards that had been under one roof since 2021. The Lurssen deal for Nobiskrug closed in early 2025, with more than 95 percent of the affected employees agreeing to move across through a transfer company designed to preserve their qualifications during the handover.

What Nobiskrug Is in 2026

Here is the honest answer, because it is exactly the kind of thing a prospective buyer or charterer has to go and dig for rather than being told: Nobiskrug is not, as of September 2026, an active independent yacht builder taking its own new orders. Lurssen has folded the Rendsburg site into its neighbouring Lurssen-Kroger yard, and in-progress work, including the unfinished Project Bullseye and at least one other suspended project, a 62 metre yacht, was transferred to Lurssen's own facilities to be completed rather than finished under the Nobiskrug name at Rendsburg. Trade reporting from early 2025 was also clear that reopening the Rendsburg site for production was not immediate: both yards needed further investment, safety inspections, re-certification and materials procurement before building work of any kind could resume there, a process administrators expected to take months rather than weeks.

For the reader, that means treating Nobiskrug today as a closed chapter rather than a going concern: it is a legacy name attached to a defined body of finished work, not a yard currently quoting new build slots under its own brand. The yachts already delivered, Tatoosh, Sailing Yacht A, Artefact and Lady Vera among them, remain very real, very afloat, and continue to be serviced, chartered and resold on the open market. But anyone drawn to Nobiskrug as a brand for a future new-build should understand they would, in practice, be talking to Lurssen about capacity at the former Rendsburg site, not commissioning a yacht from an independent Nobiskrug design and project-management team the way an owner could as recently as 2022.