Acushnet Marine ElectricEST. 2008 · MA #ME-12740
Hull #4187F/V St. Antônia2025-11

A 1981 Goudy & Stevens dragger, rewired to the day.

Forty-four years of varnished cloth-jacketed conductor came out of this Eastern-rig wooden dragger, and 2,140 feet of marine-grade tinned copper went in. The captain inherited her from his father in 1996; she has been the family boat for two generations and she is good for two more, but the wiring was past arguing. 26 working days at Fairhaven Shipyard, November 2025.

Length / hull
64 ft / wood (oak frames, cedar planking)
Builder / year
Goudy & Stevens, East Boothbay, ME / 1981
Plates worked
P-01, P-08, P-07
Days at Fairhaven Shipyard
26 working days
A wooden Eastern-rig dragger with a green hull and white deckhouse, in the Fairhaven Shipyard travel-lift with bottom paint freshly applied.
Hull #4187.a · St. Antônia in the Fairhaven travel-lift

§ 01 · The vessel

St. Antônia is a 64-foot Eastern-rig dragger built at Goudy & Stevens in East Boothbay, Maine in 1981 — one of the last of the Eastern-rig wooden draggers built on the Atlantic seaboard. She fishes groundfish (cod, haddock, flounder) and occasionally squid; main is a Detroit Diesel 8V-71 at 290 hp; ship's service is a Phasor K3 (12.5 kW) installed in 2014. Her name comes from the captain's grandmother, who emigrated from São Miguel in 1948.

§ 02 · Why a full rewire

The 1981 wiring was largely original. We found about 60% varnished cloth-jacketed copper in the original AC and DC runs, with cloth that crumbled when handled. There were 14 splices in the bilge documented during the pre-walk; 11 more found during the rewire. Insulation resistance to ground at the master switch read 1.4 MΩ — well below the 100 MΩ floor the megger should report on a working boat.[1] The boat had been working at all because the bilge had been mostly dry; one wet trip and she would have been on shore power for a year of repair.

§ 03 · Scope

Full P-01 rewire, executed in haul-out at Fairhaven Shipyard alongside a hull paint job and rudder-post bonding work. We pulled every conductor on the boat — 1,840 feet measured — and replaced with 2,140 feet of new Ancor Marine tinned copper, every run cleaner than the old (we did not fish through bulkheads where a new chase was workable). 218 terminations were re-tagged at both ends. Three new panels were installed: bridge, engine room, and a new low-voltage panel for navigation electronics.

§ 04 · What we found behind the panels

The most-instructive finds, all photographed for the binder:

  • The shore-power neutral tied to the boat's bonding system at the original 1981 Marinco inlet. ABYC E-11 §11.5 forbids this on a vessel with shore power; in 1981 the rule was less strict.[2] Untied, properly, on day eight.
  • A peanut-butter jar in the bilge containing three splices, a Hershey wrapper, and a 1989 quarter. The wiring was not energized but the splices were soldered with cored solder. We replaced.
  • Two GFCI outlets in the galley that had never been wired correctly to GFCI — the line and load terminals were swapped, so the GFCI was effectively a regular outlet. Re-terminated.
  • The bilge-pump float-switch was on the same circuit as the cabin lighting. When the cabin lights were off (engine room dim, night fishing), the pump did not run. Re-circuited to its own fused supply.

§ 05 · Outcome

The boat went back to work on the day the foreman wrote on the haul-out schedule on day one. The captain has reported zero electrical issues in the four months since. The new printed deck plan lives in a sleeve at the helm. The old wiring — the 1840 feet of cloth-jacketed conductor — is in a wooden crate at the yard, headed to the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center as an artifact of the trade.

A note on the Eastern rig

Eastern-rig draggers are a vanishing class in commercial fishing — the gear is winched from the side rather than the stern, the wheelhouse is forward, and they were built in numbers on the Maine and Massachusetts coast through the 1970s and into the 1980s. There are perhaps two dozen still actively fishing out of New Bedford. Their captains are, in general, the captains who keep their boats best.

Cross-references: Plate P-01 (rewires), P-08 (shipyard), February 2026 bulletin on bonding.

Sources & further reading

  1. American Boat & Yacht Council. E-11 §11.6 (insulation resistance). ↩
  2. ABYC. E-11 §11.5 (shore-power, neutral, and grounding). ↩
  3. Goudy & Stevens. Builder of record, East Boothbay, ME.
  4. Ancor Marine. Marine-grade tinned copper.
  5. Mystic Seaport Museum. Eastern-rig dragger collection.
  6. NOAA Fisheries. Atlantic cod and groundfish.
  7. New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center. Vessel artifacts archive.