NOAA Ship John N. Cobb (R 552) was a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel in commission from 1970 to 2008. She was named for John Nathan Cobb and was the oldest commissioned ship in the NOAA fleet when she was decommissioned, having previously served in the United States Department of the Interior′s Fish and Wildlife Service from 1950 to 1956 and in the United States Fish and Wildlife Service′s Bureau of Commercial Fisheries from 1956 to 1970 as US FWS John N. Cobb (FWS 1601). Construction and commissioning W. C. Nickum and Sons designed John N. Cobb based on a West Coast purse-seiner design. The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) funded her construction using US$150,000 ifrom the sale of the FWS fisheries research vessel Washington, and the Western Boatbuilding Company constructed her in Tacoma, Washington. She was launched on 16 January 1950 and commissioned as US FWS John N. Cobb (FWS 1601) on 18 February 1950. Technical characteristics John N. Cobb had a wooden hull. As originally constructed, she was designed for exploratory fishing cruises and fishing gear research and development, with trawling, longlining, gillnetting, and oceanographic sampling capabilities. When commissioned in 1950, she had then-modern navigational equipment, including radar, a LORAN navigation system, depth finders, and an electro-mechanical steering system. John N. Cobb had a total of 13 bunks, and her mess room could serve eight personnel at a time. During her NOAA service, she carried a complement of two NOAA Corps officers, two licensed engineers, and four other crew members, and could accommodate up to four scientists. Her deck equipment featured three winches and one boom crane. This equipment gave John N. Cobb a lifting capacity of up to as well as of cable that could pull up to . During her NOAA years, in support of her primary mission of fishery and living marine resource research for the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) division of NOAA, John N. Cobb was equipped with a shallow-water echo sounder, fishfinder, forward-looking sonar, and net sonde. She had a single laboratory of . She carried a fiberglass boat for utility and rescue purposes. She could conduct bottom trawls down to depths of over . Operational history Fish and Wildlife Service Assigned Seattle, Washington, as her home port, John N. Cobb made her first cruise in March and April 1950, operating off Alaska in search of commercially useful populations of