The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a United States based federal agency focused on the condition of the oceans and the atmosphere. In their role they undertake research projects that have utilize many different marine platforms of which the Townsend Cromwell was one.

The MV TOWNSEND CROMWELL was named after Townsend Cromwell, an oceanographer of the equatorial Pacific Ocean who served in the capacity as Oceanographer at the Pacific Ocean Fisheries Investigation (POFI) office in Honolulu, between 1949 and 1953. POFI is now known as the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service Honolulu Laboratory, whose scientific missions were chiefly supported by the CROMWELL. Townsend Cromwell was killed in a plane crash in the vicinity of Guadalajara, Mexico while joining an oceanographic expedition in June 1958.



TOWNSEND CROMWELL was decommissioned in October 2002 in Honolulu after serving as a research ship. The 163-foot x 33-foot ship was built in 1963 by J. Ray McDermott of Morgany City, Louisiana, for the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Bureau of Commercial Fisheries in Honolulu, which became part of NOAA when the agency was formed in 1970. She was transferred by the Fish and Wildife Service to NOAA in 1975 and had since supported NOAA Fisheries’ Honolulu Laboratory.

As an NOAA ship, TOWNSEND CROMWELL spent 39 years conducting fishery and living marine resource research in support of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), Honolulu Laboratory in Hawaii. The ship normally operated in the Pacific, in and around the Hawaiian Island Archipelago. She collected fish and crustacean specimens using bottom trawls, longlines, and fish traps. Over the past several years, the ship participated in multi-agency efforts to remove hundreds of tons of discarded fishing gear and other marine debris from the region’s fragile coral reef systems.



After decommissioning by the NOAA in 2002, she was originally transferred to the government of American Samoa, after which time the vessel was on sold to New Zealand based interests who have gone on to convert the vessel to her current condition.