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Deepseawaters
Home NOAA's
Oldest Ship, John N. Cobb has Retired
NOAA's Oldest Ship, John N. Cobb has Retired
August 13,2008
NOAA
ship John N. Cobb, the oldest and only wooden
hulled ship in the NOAA fleet was decommissioned on August
13,2008 in Seattle after 58 years of service.
The 93-foot fisheries research vessel began service in 1950
with the Bureau of Fisheries, predecessor to NOAA's
Fisheries Service, conducting albacore tuna surveys
in Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. Homeported in Seattle,
Cobb has operated primarily in Alaskan waters for much of
her service life, most recently in support of the fisheries
service's Auke
Bay Laboratories in Juneau.
"The
John N. Cobb has been an extremely productive platform for
NOAA. She has been operating with her original 1931-design
Fairbanks-Morse engine until this year," said Rear Admiral
Jonathan W. Bailey, director of the NOAA Corps, one of the
nation's seven uniformed services, and NOAA's
Office of Marine and Aviation Operations. "We are
sad to see Cobb go, but it would not be the best use of NOAA's
resources to perform the maintenance and repairs required
to keep her in service.
 John
N. Cobb was designed as a purse-seiner, but added capabilities
enabled her to utilize almost every type of fishing method,
including trawling, and long-lining. The ship has conducted
various types of data acquisition and research, including
juvenile salmon marine ecology, juvenile rockfish habitat
assessment, sablefish tagging and telemetry, marine mammal
surveys, coral and sponge benthic habitat, habitat mapping
of near-shore estuaries, and oceanographic sampling and long-term
coastal monitoring.
Cobb's career has
included some interesting and unusual missions:
From 1950 to 1962, Cobb conducted a series of bottomfish and
shellfish surveys from southern Oregon to the Arctic
Ocean. These early surveys still provide baseline data
for current environmental evaluations
Cobb
helped pioneer the use of surface rope trawls, which led to
the development of an important long-term data set on the
biological and physical factors affecting annual fluctuations
in the population strength of specific groups of salmon.
John N. Cobb's
post-NOAA home has yet to be determined. Preliminary plans
are underway by maritime heritage interests to preserve Cobb
as an historic representation of a federal wooden-hull fisheries
research vessel and open her to the public as part of an education-outreach
program.
As part of the fleet of
NOAA research and survey ships and vessels, John N. Cobb
has been operated, managed and maintained by officers of the
NOAA Corps and civilians under NOAA's Office
of Marine and Aviation Operations.
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