Vintage Double Hose

Not sure where to post this.....

Was looking to purchase a Hydroglove suit and found a message stating that the owner suddenly passed away Friday and they are shutting down immediately.

A real loss.

Best,
Squidlips

That is terrible news. William at Hydroglove was a great guy and he had a great product. I will definitely have to baby my hydroglove for the coming decades. If you guys are not familiar with the Hydroglove, check out the video that Swimjim made for me on my website.

Here is the video

https://vimeo.com/24956743

Sad news. I have owned a couple of Hydroglove suits.....Even though I did not know him personally, I admired his passion as entrepreneur for what he was doing.

I was lucky to get a full hydroglove set before he passed. I found out about his death when I went back to the site a month or so later to get some of their three-finger gloves and the site was down. It was such a good company with great products and helpful customer service. Never talked to william, but he knew a thing or two and had a real serious passion for older equipment, which is the same sorta feeling which got me more into pursuing a working vintage setup instead of just another thing in my collection to pput on display and never use.
I wonder if hydroglove will ever come back... Surely they have lots of products in stock they need to sell. They mention the reason for shuting down aside from the owner's death is also a lack of someone who's able to make the sale transactions. Either way, this is overall a sad situation...

I am shocked to read this because it came totally out of the blue. I've just now completed an online search to see if I could find out more and I did find the following obituary:
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/idahos ... =184097497
It says that "Bill died February 3, 2017 at home while working on one of his many projects." The Hydroglove.com website message "The owner of the company passed away suddenly on Friday" must refer to Friday, February 3, 2017 if I have identified the correct obituary in the Idaho Statesman. William "Bill" Sewell was 56, which is no age at all these days.

As others have said, Bill was not only a great entrepreneur but also a passionate historian of mid-twentieth-century diving equipment who always wanted to get every detail right. We corresponded about Skooba-totes suit measurements (I own an original suit) so that he could make his own Hydroglove suits more authentic. He was also a very generous man, providing me with space on his website to post my monographs on historical diving suits and then opening up another site with the Hydroglove name, Hydroglove.net, to host not only these suit documents but also the series of monographs about modern fins, masks and snorkels that he encouraged me to write. I was intending to add more data to this file collection during the coming week.

I bought my first Hydroglove suit when Bill began selling the product years ago. It came at the right time, when I was looking for exercise after undergoing surgery and decided to snorkel in the cold waters of the North Sea not far from where I live in England. I purchased another thicker version,sized XL to fit my fuller proportions, before Christmas 2016 and I'm just as delighted with it as I was with the first suit I bought from him. I hope it won't be my last. I will be "baptising" it in a month or two in the North Sea and I'll remember Bill, who I never met in person, while I'm doing so.

This just plain sucks!!!!!! I am shocked and sad.

"Hydro Glove will be closing effective immediately. Any orders placed on Feb 3rd or after will be canceled in our system. Please make sure you cancel the order on your end as well to make sure your money is not charged.The owner of the company passed away suddenly on Friday and there is no one else trained to fill orders. Thanks you for your understanding. "

So sad to see how fragile life can be. The loss of the man is the loss of the driving force of his business and everything else that depends on him. God rest his soul and comfort his family.