Boatyard bound

We are under way westbound in Long Island Sound, after a pleasant week in Port Jefferson, bound for Derecktor Shipyard in Mamaroneck. When I finally reached the production manager, the yard agreed to get us in on Monday morning, and yesterday I confirmed there was a space at the dock for a weekend arrival.

The timing worked out well, because we had visits right up through Thursday morning. When we were on our own in town, we enjoyed exploring the local restaurant scene. We had good pizza and beer at The Pie, and decent meals at Billie's 1890 and Prohibition, increasing our repertoire beyond the Ferryman's Grill right at the marina.

Beer at Joey Z's on arrival night.

As long as we were in town for a week, I had a number of Amazon items delivered to the nearby locker. While I might easily have walked the three miles there and back, there was a convenient county bus for just $0.75 with my first-ever senior discount (Suffolk county has a low bar). A large, modern Shop-Rite grocery was next door, which I've noted for some future visit.

We had only one day where we got a little wet on the ride home, due to chop in the harbor. We were otherwise very comfortable, save for the roughly hourly ferry wakes throughout the day. And we were in a part of the harbor where we could plane most of the way between the boat and the dock.

One of the items in my Amazon order was a six-pack of new smoke detectors. A few weeks ago the oldest of our several wirelessly-interconnected detectors "aged out," chirping it's pre-programmed end-of-life alert, which can not be silenced. We moved a younger unit from the, umm, "least risky" location on the boat until I could source a replacement for the unusable unit. That proved an impossible task; Kidde has discontinued this model altogether and I could not find one for sale either online or at a physical retailer.

New smoke alarms. Of course the holes were not the same and I needed to drill new ones.

After a couple of weeks of hunting, wherein I turned up just a couple of units online that, I reasoned, must be old stock, I wrote to the Walter Kidde company to inquire if any of the current models will communicate with the three older units we still have working, the oldest of which will not expire until 2028. The answer was, of course, no, and furthermore they blew me off when I suggested that they ought to help out in some way with the replacement of the three unexpired units.

As a side note here I will say that the old school tie has always sent me to Kidde for fire extinguishers and smoke alarms. Ol' Walt was a Stevens alum, and I had classes in a building that bore his name. Kidde is now owned by leviathan Carrier, so I suppose my allegiance might have been misplaced, but in any event it is gone now. Off I went in search of suitable replacements. Good friend Dave sent me a link to a six-pack of interconnected alarms on sale at Amazon for just a C-note; for comparison, the Kidde units had been $40 apiece.

These units are made by relative market newcomer X-Sense, a Chinese brand that mostly fared well in independent testing and garners good reviews. The six-pack comes already programmed into a single wireless group, and they have sealed 10-year lithium batteries. At $100 for the lot, I'll be ahead of the game even if they deliver only half that life. This is half again as many units as I am replacing, so I am adding coverage under the helm console and an additional unit belowdecks. My challenge now is finding a home for the three take-outs.

We had to wend our way through the staging for a boat parade on our way out of the harbor. These boats from the Port Jefferson Yacht Club have all "dressed ship."

Port Jeff has recycling bins all over town, so we took the opportunity to get all the recycling off the boat. They also have a free pump-out boat in the harbor, along with a self-serve pump-out "barge" in the middle of the harbor, and we called the boat yesterday, even though it's been less than a week.. We are mindful of how difficult it was to get pumped out in Mamaroneck from our last visit.

The plotter says we should be tied up by 3:30 or so, and we'll have a full day to get settled in before the yard opens bright and early Monday morning. I expect to be up to my eyeballs while we're at the yard, so you'll next hear from me when I get a chance to come up for air.