A small shop, on a working pier, with no patience for puffery.

§ 01 · What the shop does

We wire and service commercial fishing vessels in the New Bedford and Fairhaven harbors, and the shoreside electrical that ties them to the dock. The catalogue is eight plates — P-01 through P-08 — and we hold ourselves to it. If the work falls outside those eight plates, we either say no or we tell you who to call.

Most of the boats we keep on the books are between 38 and 95 feet, in steel, fiberglass, or wood. They are scallopers, groundfish draggers, longliners, gillnetters, and the lobster boats that work out of the south end of the harbor. We also do shoreside electrical for the piers and small adjacent businesses that the fleet relies on — a fish-house freezer, a marine-electronics shop, a refit yard's three-phase service.

What we do not do is residential, commercial-industrial ashore, or recreational boats over forty feet. Recreational under forty feet we will look at if the boat ties up in the working harbor and the owner accepts that we work the trawler's schedule first. The shop is here for the fleet, and the fleet's needs are different from a varnished sloop's.

§ 02 · What we will not do

The list is short, and we keep it where it can be read.

• We will not work on a vessel where the captain or owner has signed off on a deviation from ABYC E-11 that we believe will hurt someone. We will say so on paper. We will not fight you about it. We will simply not pick the work up.
• We will not put aluminum conductors below a waterline of any boat we know about, full stop. Tinned copper or we walk.
• We will not run conductors through bilges and engine rooms in PVC or in unrated flexible cable. Marine-grade tinned with the appropriate jacket, or it doesn't get installed.
• We will not energize a board you have asked us to put back together at five o'clock if the load-bank test has not run. The board waits until morning.
• We will not kite an estimate. The single-page sheet you get from us is what you pay, plus or minus what we discover in the bilge. We tell you when we discover it.

These rules exist because the fleet hires us when the last shop walked off, and the last shop almost always walked off because it cut a corner. Captains know the difference. We would rather lose the job than be the next walk-off.

§ 03 · The code framework we work to

Marine electrical sits at the intersection of three code regimes, and the fights between them are where boats get hurt. We hold ourselves to the strictest interpretation in every case.

The American Boat & Yacht Council's E-11 standard governs AC and DC electrical systems on small craft and is the operating manual we live in.^[1] Where E-11 is silent, we apply Article 555 of the National Electrical Code (NFPA 70).^[2] Above 79 feet and on inspected vessels, the U.S. Coast Guard's regulations under 46 CFR govern, and we work to those.^[3] For data networks — sounders, plotters, autopilots, AIS — we follow the National Marine Electronics Association's NMEA 2000 specification, which is a CAN-bus protocol with strict cabling rules.^[4]

The crew carries the current ABYC standards binder in the truck, and we keep the master copy in the yard. If we cite a section number to you, you are welcome to ask to see the page.

§ 04 · How we bill

The hourly rate as of January 2026 is published openly on our rates page. There is one rate for journeyman work, one for the master rate (used for regulatory work, survey-prep walks, switchboard design, and arc-flash studies), and one for after-hours and weekend calls. Travel time inside the New Bedford / Fairhaven / Mattapoisett / Westport line is not billed. Outside that line we bill from the yard.

Parts are billed at our cost plus twelve percent. We share the supplier invoices with you on request — that is the deal. We do not have a special markup for special parts. We do not charge for "shop supplies" and we do not bill for the printed deck plan we leave you.

Estimates come on a single page. If we are wrong, we tell you the moment we know. The change order is also a single page.

§ 05 · Where the shop came from

Dom Medeiros came up through the IBEW Local 223 apprenticeship in the late 1990s, did seven years of building work and four of utility-substation work before crossing the Acushnet to take a generator-rebuild bench at a Fairhaven yard. The shop opened in March 2008, in a leased bay at the foot of MacArthur Drive, three months before the financial crisis. The first job was a shore-power tie-in on a 64-foot dragger; the cordage from that job is the one hanging on the wall in the photograph above.

The shop became a four-person operation in 2014 with Luis Alves; Saoirse Ferreira joined in 2019 as the controls and NMEA-2000 lead; the apprentice rotated three times before Raymond Tavares stayed in 2023. The four of us work out of the same bay on MacArthur Drive. We do not have a satellite office and we do not plan to.

If you want a longer account of the boats we have worked on, the names are kept on the Hulls page. The dates are accurate; the captain anecdotes are not embellished.

§ 06 · What we stand for

The fleet feeds the country. NOAA Fisheries reported that in 2022 the United States commercial fishing fleet landed 8.5 billion pounds of seafood worth $11.8 billion at the dock, and that New Bedford was once again the most valuable port in the country. That is not a number we look at often, but it is what we work for. The boats that bring those landings home are old; their wiring is older still; and almost no one wants to crawl under their floorboards in the middle of February. We do.

We believe that when a boat leaves the State Pier at 03:30 in a January nor'easter, the wiring on board should not be the reason it doesn't come home. The shop's job is to keep that promise — quietly, on time, and with the paperwork to prove it.

If you want to see what that looks like in practice, the Hulls log is the most honest record. Our recent work is also written up in the quarterly Bulletins, and the Crew page tells you who shows up to your boat.

You can reach us at +1 508 555 0184, by mail at yard@acushnet-marine-electric.example, or in person at 230 MacArthur Drive between 06:30 and 16:30 on a weekday. The yard is shut on Sundays.