A winter survey of the State Pier. Nine bad cords.

§ 01 · The walk

The walk took two of us five hours, on a Friday afternoon when most boats were tied for the weekend. Permission came from MassDevelopment's State Pier office and from the New Bedford HDC. The captain (or whoever was aboard) granted access; if no one was aboard, we did not energize anything — we visually inspected the cord and reported the boat's hull number to the harbor master if the cordage looked obviously bad.

The test was simple: with the boat unplugged and the cord disconnected at both ends, we put 500 V DC across hot-to-ground and neutral-to-ground with a Megger MIT400, and recorded the result. Anything below 5 MΩ failed; we would not return that cord to service.

§ 02 · What failed

Nine cords out of forty-three. The breakdown:

• Six cords were tinned-copper inside but had been cut and re-spliced with butt connectors that were not waterproof. Water had ingressed and rusted the copper at the joint.
• Two cords had visible jacket damage from being run over by a forklift on the apron. The conductor was crushed and the insulation was cracked.
• One cord had a Marinco-style plug at the boat end that had thermally failed — the brass had blackened from arcing — and the carbon path had gone through the strain relief into the conductor's insulation.

§ 03 · The root cause is rarely cordage manufacturing

The cordage itself, when it leaves the factory, is good for a decade in saltwater service. What kills it is post-manufacturing: the cut-and-splice repair done with the wrong connector, the forklift run, or the over-tightened strain relief that tweaks the conductor inside.

We have not seen a manufacturing failure in eight years on this pier. Every cord that has failed has had a story.

§ 04 · The quiet fix

The harbor master sent the list of nine boats to their captains, named, and told them we were available to repair on Monday. By Wednesday afternoon all nine were back in service: six new cordage runs (we cut the boats new SOOW 6/4 lengths in 50-foot or 75-foot to suit), two new SmartPlug 50A connectors at the boat end, and one new Hubbell HBL on a 100A cord. The total cost across all nine boats was $9,840 in parts and labor, billed at our standard rates.

None of the captains had been told before that their cordage was a problem. Most of them had been intermittently tripping the dock pedestal for months — usually written off as cold-weather. It was not.

Cross-references: Plate P-03, F/V Providential's tie-in.