230 MacArthur Drive, New Bedford. Knock on the blue door.

§ 01 · Finding the yard

Coming south on Route 18 (the John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway), take the Cove Street / MacArthur Drive exit, follow MacArthur Drive south past Pier 3, and the yard is on your left, half a block before the State Pier loading area. Coming over the New Bedford–Fairhaven Bridge from Fairhaven, take the right onto MacArthur northbound and we are on your right after the Fish Pier turn-in.

The building is a low cinder-block bay shared with a marine-electronics shop and a sailmaker. Our bay is the south one, the one with the blue door. There is no flashy signage. The boat-builder's coffee truck is usually parked across the street between 06:00 and 09:00 and that is one of two reliable landmarks; the other is a 1962 GMC stake-bed parked on the corner that has not moved in our entire tenancy.

§ 02 · Parking and transit

There are seven public parking spaces along the harbor side of MacArthur Drive directly across from us; if those are full, the lot at Pope's Island Marina is a four-minute drive and the walk back over the Pope's Island Bridge is one of the best in the harbor. The Steamship Authority lot at the south end of MacArthur is a paid lot and we strongly suggest you do not park there unless you are sailing to Martha's Vineyard.^[1]

The Southeastern Regional Transit Authority's SRTA Route 9 stops at the corner of MacArthur Drive and Cove Street — a four-minute walk to the yard.^[2] If you are coming from out of town, the New Bedford Regional Airport (KEWB) is fifteen minutes by car and rents Hertz; the Boston South Station bus runs every two hours and the New Bedford bus terminal is a $10 cab from the yard. If you are coming by boat, the closest visitor's slip is at Pope's Island Marina — we can usually meet you there in the dinghy.

§ 03 · Hours

The yard is open at 06:30 weekdays and the door stays unlocked through 16:30. Saturdays we open at 07:00 and we close at noon. Sundays we are shut, except for after-hours emergency calls. Federal holidays we are shut.

If we are out on a boat we leave a clipboard on the workbench inside the door — write down your hull number, the symptom, and a phone number, and we will call back inside two hours during business hours. If a boat needs to leave on the next tide, write the slack-tide time on the same line and one of us will get to you sooner.

§ 04 · Bringing a job

The simplest way is to call the yard line. Tell us:

• The hull number, or the boat's name and the captain's name.
• Where the boat is tied or hauled (State Pier slot, Pier 3 finger, Fairhaven Shipyard travel-lift, etc.).
• The symptom, in plain English: "the main board is buzzing", "the RSW thermostat is reading two degrees below the gauge", "I cannot get NMEA 2000 to come up from the chartplotter".
• When the boat is leaving next, and what tide.

One of us walks the boat with you in the next 24 hours of business time, takes notes against the appropriate ABYC checklist, and writes a single-page plate of work. You get the estimate by the next morning. If the work is small — under $400 of parts, under three hours of labor — we will often just start, and the line on the bill is itemized.

For survey-prep work, we strongly suggest you call us at least three weeks before the surveyor's date. The list of items we walk against is published, and you can do most of it yourself.

§ 05 · After-hours, weekends, the dead of winter

The after-hours line is +1 508 555 0185. It rolls to whichever of the four of us is on duty that week. We carry it Friday at 16:30 through Monday at 06:30, and on federal holidays. The dispatch fee is $185 and the call-out hourly rate is $215, billed in 30-minute increments. We do not charge a holiday or nighttime multiplier on top of that — the rate is the rate.

If the call is a boat in distress — smoke, sparks, water in the engine room, a dead generator and a freezer full of scallops — we move first and bill later. The captain's first priority is the catch and the crew. We get there.

§ 06 · The piers we work

We work alongside on the following:

• State Pier — managed by MassDevelopment. The most boats per square foot in the harbor.
• Pier 3 — the Harbor Development Commission pier on MacArthur Drive directly opposite our yard.
• Leonard Wharf — the south HDC pier, mostly groundfish.
• South Terminal — for the larger steel-hulled scallopers and the offshore-wind vessels that share the dock.
• Fairhaven Shipyard — the travel-lift and dry-graving slip across the river. We share keys.
• Bristol Marine, Somerset — about thirty minutes up Route 6, for boats that haul there.
• Pope's Island Marina — mostly recreational, but we'll work there for working-vessel jobs.

§ 07 · Send a note

No autoresponder. A real person reads this and calls back inside two hours during business hours, or first thing next morning.