Volume 56, Number 3 December 2012 Photo by Denice Drass

NOAA Ship OregON ii
December 2012 ~ Mariners Weather Log
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NOAA ShiP OrEgON ii
When the NOAA Ship OREGON II first set sail in 1967
(homeport NOAA/NMFS/SEFSC/Mississippi Laboratories,
Pascagoula, MS), the expectation was the vessel would have
a service span of 20–25 years; not the remarkable 45 years
of service the ship has completed. Globally and historically
there are few research ships that can compare, and with the
deployment of the 300 th expedition the OREGON II has
certainly secured an honored place in the annals of scientific
history. The OREGON II has logged over 10,000 days at
sea and steamed more than 1,000,000 nautical miles, with
projects ranging from as far south as the Amazon River
Delta in Brazil, the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, and
extending north in the Atlantic Ocean to Cape Cod. With
such a noteworthy and extensive record it speaks well of
NOAA’s mission when considering the impact the OREGON
II has had not only on fisheries research and marine science
in general, but also on the lives of the many that have sailed
aboard her.
With the departure of the 300 th expedition (the annual
red snapper/shark bottom longline survey) scheduled for
July 26, 2012, the OREGON II will dutifully continue its
tradition of providing a research platform that is uniquely
adaptable to a changing diversity of scientific objectives.
The OREGON II has been the platform for many different
stock assessment surveys including groundfish/shrimp,
NOAA Ship OrEgON ii (circa 1967)
sharks, reef fish, mammals and plankton and has deployed
many types of gear such as pelagic and bottom longline gear,
trawl gear(with turtle excluder devices and bycatch reduction
devices), plankton nets and remotely operated vehicles/traps/
cameras. The OREGON II has provided NOAA’s National
Weather Service’s Voluntary Observing Ship Program with
well over 25,000 marine weather observations supporting
many efforts; forecasting, hurricane tracking, environmental
analysis, oceanography and climatology, just to identify a
few. The OREGON II was used as a test bed platform for the
automation of marine weather observations and has proven
to be a success, thus currently sending in hourly data while
underway conducting surveys. In addition, the OREGON II
has been used as a training platform for numerous sea going
personnel including ship captains, NOAA Corps officers and
also opportunities for the NOAA Teacher at Sea Program
where it was the first NOAA vessel to accommodate a teacher
at sea.
An example of how the vessel has had to adapt to over four
decades of conducting science is best demonstrated by at-sea
data collection; an activity that in 1967 was primarily a paper
and pencil technology that has since transitioned to its present
state-of-the-art-technology that links weatherproof on-deck
data collection computers with ship computer systems that
are capable of transmitting data in real time. With the possible