According to NOAA’s Fisheries Service the 93-foot fisheries research vessel has started its service in 1950 with the Bureau of Fisheries, predecessor to NOAA’s Fisheries Service. The ship used to conduct 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.
Rear Admiral Jonathan W. Bailey, director of the NOAA Corps, admitted that 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. He also said that it is 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.
Originally 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. NOAA told that 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.
It is said that 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. The ship was named after John Nathan Cobb, an author, naturalist, and conservationist (1868-1930) whose distinguished career included service as editor of Pacific Fisherman and founding director of the College of Fisheries, University of Washington–the first fisheries school in the United States.
