Four hands. Same blue door for eighteen years.
There are four of us. We share a single bay, a single workbench, and a single phone line. None of us is a partner-in-name on a separate yard. Below is who shows up to your boat, in the order we joined the shop.
Sitting the journeyman exam in June 2026.
How we split the work
Walks and survey-prep work go to Dom. NMEA 2000 and controls work go to Saoirse. Refrigeration and AVR-bench work go to Luis. Tear-out, conduit, terminations, and the helper side of any plate go to Raymond. Everyone does shore-power tie-ins; everyone does troubleshooting; the boat picks the hand more than the title does.
The shop's discipline is that no one carries a job alone past about half a day. Two-hand work is safer, faster on diagnosis, and produces the kind of paperwork a captain can read three years later. The rotation has been steady since 2014 and we are not in a hurry to change it.
No subcontractors
The four of us are the four of us. We do not subcontract our electrical work. The only sub-trade we lean on is Electric Motor Rewinding in Pawtucket for stator-winding heat-shrinks — a specialty trade we do not pretend to. Otherwise, the hands on your boat work for the shop.
For mechanical refrigeration work we coordinate with Fish Ex Marine Refrigeration on Pier 3, and for diesel work we coordinate with Cummins Eastern Power. Those are colleagues, not subs — we work alongside, not under, and the captain pays each shop directly.
How the crew came together
The four hands have known one another for, in aggregate, about 32 person-years on the water. Dom and Luis met in 2009 when Luis was still an apprentice at Fish Ex; they shared a project on the F/V St. Antônia (Hull #4187) that year that ran late and they have been calling each other Christmas since. Saoirse arrived from her UMass Dartmouth thesis in 2019, recommended by a Mattapoisett Yacht Club commodore who had seen Dom present at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Raymond came in through the IBEW Local 223 apprentice rotation in 2023 after the previous apprentice (a fine hand named Will Marston, now journeyman at C&H Marine Services) tested out.
The crew is unionized in spirit if not membership. We pay journeyman scale at or above IBEW Local 223 prevailing rates, our apprentices go through the Massachusetts Division of Apprentice Standards registry, and we keep the fairer-than-the-market rates the trade deserves.