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Homer

Welcome to NJScuba.net, a website dedicated to exploring the New Jersey / New York region underwater -- "Wreck Valley". Here you will find information on dive sites, marine biology, artifacts and activities, gear and training, and many other subjects.

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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.


All the content from the old site has been loaded into the new one. I didn't leave out anything. After fixing obvious errors, now it is time to start improving.

Six new lines of PHP code allow me to now have two titles for each page. The standard WordPress title is used for all the navigation structures, where it needs to fit in a prescribed space, hence needs to be short. In most cases that is also fine for everything, but sometimes I'd like something more descriptive for page title, headers, etc. Now the short title can be very short, and the long title can be very long - no more need to compromise. This is actually a simple fix for a major shortcoming of WordPress. I am continuing to force it into becoming a real CMS.


I added a slew of new features and capabilities to my standard "Simple" theme, and I think I'm done ( except for the inevitable bug fixes. ). It is still simple to use, but actually pretty sophisticated behind the scenes. The major additions:


Started putting the content in. Figured out how to replicate almost all of the styles of the old site. This is going to take a while - there are over 1100 pages to fill in. Most of them should be quick and easy, I've been tackling the tough ones to start with.


ShipBuildingHistory.com is a resource that I have often used to look up many of the reefs and a few of the wrecks in this website. I recently sent in an update, and received a notice that the author had passed away. The next thing that usually happens in these cases is that the website disappears when the hosting goes unpaid, so I immediately grabbed a copy for myself.

That's when I found that the original site was almost a terabyte in size, and 95% of that was formatting. So I cleaned it up, and cleaned it up, and cleaned it up, and added some navigation structures and other niceties that you would expect. Then I posted my copy as a sub-site here:


I've been working on my slideshow WordPress plugin, and I think it is about finished. This took just a few minutes to do, with no problems:

The Mohawk

The port side of the hull near the bow. The lower part still stands, while the upper part has collapsed.
Fallen hull ribs near the bow.
A large winch and machinery, perhaps for the anchors.
Empty rivet holes on hull plates now lying scattered across the bottom. The curved opening at lower-left looks like it might once have held a porthole.
Rear axle, differential, leaf spring, rubber tire and wheel from a truck, near the bow. The cast iron differential casing has rotted away, but the steel spline gears remain.
An old flathead-six truck engine, with one of the front wheels just behind. You can make out the intake runner, minus carburetor.
Amidships, the front (north) side of the half-buried boiler. There is a second boiler in front of this one, collapsed.
Amidships, the front (north) side of the half-buried boiler. There is a second boiler in front of this one, collapsed.
The back (south) side of the remaining boiler, showing caps for fire tubes. The front side of the boiler is solid. Note the large crack in the corner.
Looking forward at the main reduction gears, just behind the boiler.

These huge gears converted the high-speed of the steam turbines to the much lower speed of the propellers. From the geometry of the exposed portion, I estimate that they are approximately twelve feet in diameter, with about two feet exposed. That places the prop shaft about four feet below the sand, and the bottom of the hull more than 10 feet down. These gears would be connected to the propeller shaft, and surrounded by a casing and smaller drive gears. See marine engines for details of such an installation.
Close-up, with some of the marine growth wiped away to show the diagonal teeth.
Moving aft (south) from the boiler along a crumpled framework. This reminds me of an overhead monorail, and is easily big enough to swim under.
More car parts, near the stern.
The aft port side of the wreck is collapsed inward. This is plainly evident in the side-scan image above.
Some kind of heavy machinery.
The Mohawk is mostly just an incomprehensible jumble.

It takes a lot of diving to learn your way around this mess. I've been diving it and studying it about once a week all season (2004), and it's starting to make sense. For the casual diver without such experience, a wreck reel is strongly advised. If nothing else, you can use it as an upline once you realize that not using it from the start was a mistake.
A scene at the extreme stern end of the wreck. For scale, the 'pipe' in the scene is actually a deck support, and is over a foot in diameter.

The Algol

The bow, looking down over the rail of the starboard 40mm gun platform.
Looking down from the forward winch house at a doorway on deck, starboard side. Railings and catwalks are rusting away fast.
The cut-off mid-ships winch house, from the port side ...
... and from some other side.
Looking down on ventilators while swimming aft. I'm not certain, but I think this is the small deckhouse on the port side near the mid-ships winch house. Marine snow streaks across these long exposures like driving rain.
Looking down into the #3 cargo hold.
Various things on the roof of the superstructure, more ventilators, I think. Many an AOW student should recognize this spot.
The cut-off smokestack, from the port side.
The cut-off smokestack, from in front. A small person could fit down the circular hole in the middle.
Looking down off the port bridge wing at the deck below. The leading cunner swam up and bit me a right after I took this picture. They really are little bastards.

After about a year of stable operation, I fixed a few minor bugs in my WordPress theme and plugins, mostly in the back end. The only thing noticeable is that I got the broken tide tables working again. Other than that, the system seems pretty mature, I can't think of any new features to add, and my code seems to be pretty resilient against changes in the WordPress core. In other words, try as they might, they have not broken my extensions in a long time.


Ha ha ha, I spelled its name wrong. But it caught it!

I've been using the browser extension Grammarly to check spelling and punctuation in the site. This is a big job that will take a week or two in small pieces, but is actually not difficult. In fact, it requires very little thinking, it is almost mechanical. I had the necessary functionality to do this quickly and efficiently already built into the WordPress back-end, this is the first time I am using it.


A thousand monkeys at a thousand computers would be guaranteed to produce WordPress. In fact, they already have.

In a WordPress site like this, the look and feel are determined by the 'theme'. Working on the theme seems to be a never-ending task. First, I keep thinking of new features, and almost everything is baked into the theme, rather than in a stand-alone 'plugin'. When a feature is built into the theme, it can't be accidentally disabled.


Featured

I started this site way back in 1996 for my new hobby. In all that time, I gladly carried the annual cost of hosting and domain name. But it's time to admit that my diving years are over, and my interest has waned.

I have kept the site up as a service to the diving community, but I don't know how much longer that makes sense.

If you would like to make a small donation to help defray that cost, it would be greatly appreciated, and help to keep the site online.

Simply click the PayPal button below or anywhere else you find it:


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New Developments in Artificial Reefs

Pauline Marie reef
The Pauline Marie sinks slowly on the Atlantic City Reef.

By Evelyn DeWitt Myatt & Bill Figley, 1986

It's hard to imagine anything that could have looked more forlorn than the rusty old freighter whose proud seagoing days were a thing of the past. Floating idly at her berth awaiting her fate, she was a victim of nature's ravages that had left her beautiful only in the eyes of her old captain and crew. The Pauline Marie, however, was not destined to be the victim of a cutting torch that would turn her into a tangle of scrap steel. Instead, she was acquired by the New Jersey Artificial Reef Program and went down with dignity as an artificial reef in March 1985. She now provides continuing services from her watery grave in the Atlantic, some twelve miles off Atlantic City, and her appeal to marine life is undeniable. Her interior compartments now shelter fish and crustaceans; her decks now provide substrate for mussels, soft corals, and plant life; and her newfound productivity has put delicious seafood on many tables.

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