Wiring the New Bedford fleet, one hull at a time.
We are a four-hand marine electrical shop on MacArthur Drive, half a block from the State Pier. We rewire scallopers, set fish-hold refrigeration controls, terminate shore-power cordage, rebuild 480 V switchboards, and put boats through their ABYC and USCG paperwork without drama. Built and maintained by people who can tell a Cummins KTA-19 from a CAT 3406 by ear.
Vessel rewires
Stem-to-stern rewires for trawlers and scallopers, mostly 30–95 ft, in tinned copper to ABYC E-11. We pull every conductor, label both ends, and leave you a printed deck plan.
Read plate ↗ Plate P-02Fish-hold refrigeration controls
RSW and slurry-ice control panels for scallop, squid, and herring boats. Carel and Danfoss controllers; intrinsically-safe wiring where ammonia is in the room.
Read plate ↗ Plate P-03Shore-power tie-ins
50 A and 100 A landside tie-ins at State Pier, Pier 3, Leonard Wharf, and the South Terminal. SmartPlug and Hubbell, with isolation transformers where galvanic corrosion has been the symptom.
Read plate ↗ Plate P-04Switchboard upgrades
Replacing 1980s 480/240 V boards with new IEEE/IEC-rated switchgear. Selective coordination studies, arc-flash labels, full as-built drawings on D-size paper.
Read plate ↗ Plate P-05Generator rebuilds
Northern Lights, Phasor, and old Onan sets returned to spec. AVR replacements, brush rings, bearings, governor linkages — and the load-bank test that proves it.
Read plate ↗ Plate P-06NMEA 2000 integration
A clean backbone with proper 120 Ω terminators, a single drop per device, and a lab-tested termination resistance documented on the bridge. Garmin, Furuno, Simrad, Maretron mixed without grief.
Read plate ↗ Plate P-07Survey prep
Pre-survey walks for ABYC, USCG load-line, and underwriter audits. We mark what fails before the surveyor does, and supply the corrective-action package.
Read plate ↗ Plate P-08Shipyard collaboration
We share keys with Bristol Marine, Fairhaven Shipyard, and Steamship Authority — turning around drydock electrical alongside hull, paint, and refit work. We work to your foreman's schedule.
Read plate ↗F/V Providential
Full main-board replacement and shore-power tie-in upgrade after a galvanic-corrosion event off Georges Bank.
F/V St. Antônia
Rewire of a 1981 Goudy & Stevens dragger after the long-overdue retirement of its varnished cloth-covered conductors.
F/V Northern Runner
A clean NMEA 2000 backbone retrofit and Garmin/Furuno integration after three previous shops left a tangle.
F/V Cape Cod Tradition
Northern Lights M99C13 generator rebuild plus AVR replacement, with a witnessed load-bank to 80 kW.
Fish-hold refrigeration controls — what failure looks like
A short field tour of the four ways an RSW board fails on a scalloper, and the controller settings that cover most of them.Grounding and bonding aboard — ABYC E-11 in plain English
Why your zinc anodes are eating each other, and what a proper bonding system looks like on a steel-hulled boat with a 24 V house bank.Shore-power cordage — a winter survey of the State Pier
We walked every cord on the State Pier in late November. Here is what we found, named by hull, and the quiet way we got it fixed.Load-line survey prep — the 11 items we tag first
A surveyor's tape measure does not lie. Here are the eleven electrical items that catch boats out, ranked by how often we see them.The Acushnet River meets Buzzards Bay at the south end of the harbor, and the working waterfront runs from Coggeshall Street down past Pier 3, the State Pier, Leonard Wharf, the Steamship Authority terminal on Pope's Island, and out to the South Terminal. We work every pier on this list and we keep an inventory of the cordage you most often hand us when something has fractured.
The Port of New Bedford has been the most valuable commercial fishing port in the United States since 1999, holding that position twenty-six years running, with $451 million in landed value reported in 2019 by NOAA Fisheries.[1] The fleet that takes us up that list is not glamorous — it is wet, it is iron, it is loud — and the electrical underneath is what keeps it on its feet.
We are unaffiliated with the Port Authority, the Harbor Development Commission, and any vessel operator. We work for the captain and the engineer who hire us, on the schedule the foreman keeps, and we do not split loyalties.
— Dom Medeiros, founder, on the inaugural Friday meeting, 2008-03-14
1 · Tie up
Tie up at the State Pier, Pier 3, or Leonard Wharf, or we’ll meet you at Fairhaven Shipyard if you’re hauling out. Call the yard line and tell us your hull number and the symptom.
2 · Walk
One of us walks the boat with you, takes notes against the ABYC E-11 checklist, and writes you a handwritten plate of work the same day.
3 · Quote
You get a single-page, line-itemed estimate by the next morning. Hourly rate is plain. Parts are billed at our cost plus 12 percent.
4 · Work
We start when you say. Big jobs (boards, rewires) we coordinate with the foreman. Survey prep we can usually slot inside a week.