OMS Taken Over by DUI

Well, it's that time of year again, time to renew the web hosting. And for those of you that don't know, that has become a lot more expensive than it used to be. Fifty dollars a year is now several hundred. Not to mention the price of domain names has gone up ten-fold.

And I just found out that the nice folks at PayPal disabled all my Support buttons, and I never got a notice (although that may be my fault.) In any case, it is all working again now, so if you would like to make a small donation to help defray these costs, it would be greatly appreciated.

This website has a link checker, and it just informed me that the OMS link was bad. Sure enough, the website is gone. But it looks like DUI has taken over OMS - the full line of OMS stuff is in the 'OMS' section of DUI's site. So it's probably a good thing, especially in this economic environment. DUI will be around for a long time - they make most if not all of the military's drysuits. Now they have a full line of tech gear; as I recall, I was never too impressed with their own BC designs. Just checked on Dive Rite - they're still there.


steam-powered winch
A steam-powered winch on a schooner barge. Note the various drums for drawing up anchor chain, towing hawsers, etc, and the anchor chains themselves going down through the deck into the chain locker below.

Prior to steam power, the only force available on a sailing ship to perform all the necessary work was the men on board. For some tasks, such as raising the anchor, it might be necessary to yoke the entire crew to a multi-deck manual capstan. On the largest vessels, even with every available man, this might take several hours to complete. With the advent of steam power, a "donkey engine" and a single engineer could do the work of many men, in less time, and these were soon installed in almost all vessels.

Printed from njscuba.net