A constant tension towing winch maintains constant towing rope tension between the cable ship and the cable laying machine. In this paper, an active constant tension controller based upon a hybrid FUZZY P+ID strategy is proposed to improve the performance yield of the conventional PID controller that was implemented on the towing winch. The FUZZY P+ID controller replaces the P item of the conventional PID with the FUZZY P item, but the I and D items remain unchanged. The comparative studies of the FUZZY P+ID and traditional PID controllers were conducted, and the numerical simulation results show that the performance of the proposed FUZZY P+ID controller is superior to that of the PID controller. The proposed FUZZY P+ID controller was implemented in the constant tension towing winch to substitute for the existing PID controller. The real applications for driving the submarine cable laying ship under harsh undersea conditions demonstrated the robustness of the FUZZY P+ID for a number of unmeasurable disturbances, such as the buoyancy, the drag force, and wave effects.