There are no ship details included on this page but there follows an extract from "The History of the Supply Ship" which details the disappearance of the company. The remaining OSA ships which are part of the OIL fleet can be found on that page:

The purchase of OSA by OIL was one of the more surprising events of the decade, and definitely the most surprising of 1988. Everyone looked back to the mid 1970s when the OSA fleet had seemed to be in the ascendant, in the same way as the Maersk fleet was to become at the turn of the century. When the business needed anchor-handlers OSA would turn out a few and when it needed pipe-carriers, no problem, there they were occupying most of the berths alongside in Aberdeen.

During the previous decade the OSA anchor-handlers had lain in the River Tay, grey, glamorous and menacing as they swung round their anchors for weeks at a time waiting for the day rates to rise to a point where some-one could afford them.  To the crews of the smaller ships, and at that time that was everyone else, they were known as “the Grand Fleet”.

OSA, and just to remind everyone - OSA stands for the “Offshore Supply Association”, had a tendency to build parallel ships for their main partners, some of them ending in the letters “turm” and others in the letters “tor”. Hence the group of 9000 bhp anchor-handlers which entered service in the mid 1970s  were the Schepelsturm, the Schnoorturm, the Werdertor, the Herdentor and the extremely large and efficient platform ships were the Huntetor, the Faldentor, the Kaubturm, and the Kreuzturm.  Some of these vessels still formed the backbone of the OSA fleet when OIL made the purchase, and large numbers of small pipe carriers were also included in the deal.

OIL were very proud of the acquisition and were able to continue their operations as a world wide service provider. The deal was done for £28 million and it enhanced OIL’s increasing reputation as a successful fire sale bidder.

The table below was inserted using the data available in 1986 about the OSA fleet. There are a lot of ships.

Updated 24th May 2013