September 16, 2015 — At the beginning of last winter, the owners of the fishing vessel Irish Piper brought their 41-foot wooden boat from Maine to the Gloucester Marine Railways for repair and wharfage, then vanished, never returning to claim their boat or pay for the services rendered by the boat yard.
“They never even checked on it and never came back,” said Viking Gustafson, general manager of the railways. “It just got dumped at the dock.”
Gustafson said the Irish Piper’s owners — listed in court documents as Keith Butterfield of New Bedford and Stephen Lozinak of Newbury — failed to respond to a litany of phone calls and correspondence seeking payment or the removal of the vessel.
So, the railways did what you might expect: it sued Butterfield and Lozinak in U.S. District Court in Boston for payment of the more than $7,000 owed for tending to the craft throughout last winter, including a pair of haulings to protect the vessel from two of the season’s most severe storms.