the assistance of the purse-seiner Karen Rae, which was in distress in Icy Strait in the Alexander Archipelago in southeastern Alaska. As fisheries science renewed its focus on the marine ecology of juvenile salmon and other epipelagic fishes, John N. Cobb helped to pioneer the use of surface rope trawls from 1997 to 2007. This led to the creation of the Southeast Coastal Monitoring Project and allowed the development of an understanding of the biophysical factors affecting fluctuations from year to year in salmon populations. John N. Cobb′s 50th anniversary in the fleets of NOAA and its predecessors was celebrated in 2000. On 10 May 2004, she rendered assistance to the Alaska Marine Highway System ferry , which had run aground that morning in Peril Strait near Cozian Reef, about north of Sitka, Alaska. She joined other vessels in rescuing LeConte′s 86 passengers from life rafts, picking up most of them herself. NOAA's plans called for John N. Cobb to remain active until August 2008, but the main crankshaft in her original 1931 Fairbanks-Morse locomotive engine broke in June 2008, rendering her inoperable. Repairs were estimated to cost $245,000 and take four to six months to complete, so NOAA decided to bring her long career to an end. She was decommissioned on 13 August 2008 at the Sand Point facility in Seattle, and was the oldest NOAA ship at the time of her decommissioning. Later career After decommissioning John N. Cobb, NOAA donated her to the Seattle Maritime Academy, a branch of Seattle Central Community College, and she was moved to Salmon Bay in Seattle. She was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 11 February 2009, but the Academy never repaired her broken crankshaft, and she remained moored in Salmon Bay under the Ballard Bridge for about seven years. In 2015, the Academy sold her to Daniel J. Webb, who moved her to Port Townsend, Washington, in February 2016 to repair her crankshaft. However, John N. Cobb by then was waterlogged and too heavy for the port's equipment to haul out of the water. Unable to pay her mooring fees or for her repairs, Webb abandoned her at Port Townsend. A legal dispute over payment of mooring fees and for repairs to the vessel broke out during 2016 between the Port of Port Townsend and the State of Washington, which represented the Seattle Maritime Academy; the port