Ship’s Documentation Services moves to Main Street
ELLSWORTH — The jump from processing insurance claims to registering new vessel ownership with the U.S. Coast Guard may seem a long one, but for Susan Brown, owner of the Bayside Documentation Co., the transition was natural and successful.
More than two decades ago, Brown moved to Downeast Maine from Vermont and took a clerical job with the Hinckley Insurance agency in Manset. At the time, the insurance business was in the same building as the Hinckley Co. yacht brokerage office run by Robert Hinckley.
When the woman who did the federal documentation work in that office left, Brown took over the paperwork needed to get a federal ship’s “document,” the equivalent of a state registration form, for new Hinckley yachts and boats sold through the brokerage office.
“I only had two days to learn, and that wasn’t enough,” Brown said during a Monday telephone call from her winter home in Dade City, Fla.
To make up for the lack of training, Brown said, she developed a “good rapport” with someone at the U.S. Coast Guard office in Boston that then processed documentation issues.
Eventually, Brown said, she found she enjoyed the work enough so that she asked her boss at the insurance office if she could offer documentation services to other Mount Desert Island boatbuilders such as Ellis Boats and Lee Wilbur Yachts.
She got the go-ahead and, in 1994, the Hinckley Documentation Service was established with Brown at the helm.
By 1998, Brown had two young children in school and felt she needed to work from her home in Trenton rather than the office on MDI. When she couldn’t work out a satisfactory arrangement with Hinckley, she started her Bayside Documentation Co.
Besides local boatbuilders and yacht brokers, Brown was working with several local banks that provided financing for some of the transactions and secured their loans with a “first preferred ship mortgage” that was physically recorded on the paper document that evidenced vessel ownership.
“I developed a rapport with the bankers; I had feeling they would still use me,” Brown said.
Evidently, she was right. In the past two decades, Bayside has processed, by her estimate, more than 10,000 transactions involving the registration of vessels, renewal of those registrations and the filing and discharge of the mortgages that finance many of the purchases. While initially nearly all of her work involved recreational vessels, ultimately about 80 percent of the transactions came to involve commercial fishing vessels.
Five years ago, Brown hired Amanda Brand of Ellsworth to help with the reams of paperwork. Brand’s then husband, she said, was a sternman on one of the boats documented through Bayside.
This fall, she moved Bayside’s office from Trenton to its new home at 194 Main St. in Ellsworth and, with Brown in Florida for the winter, Brand is fully in charge.
While most of the company’s work centers on boats that are built in Maine and ply Maine waters, Bayside has documented vessels throughout the United States, in Bermuda, Brown said, “and even one in Australia.”
Like many businesses overwhelmed by paper records, Bayside is currently converting two decades worth of files to digital format.
Besides documentation services, Brand said Bayside also helps fishermen with the paperwork involved in obtaining or transferring the federal permits required to participate in certain fisheries.
