1968: The Launch of a U.S. Navy Survey Ship in Scotland

May 13, 1968

The U.S. Navy survey ship USNS Chauvenet (T-AGS-29) was launched in the Scottish port city of Glasgow. (“USNS” stands for “U.S. Navy Ship”; this designation is used for non-commissioned ships that, while owned by the U.S. Navy, are largely operated and crewed by the Military Sealift Command [MSC] or other civilian-staffed naval commands.) USNS Chauvenet was the second survey ship to be named after William Chauvenet (1820-1870), a pivotal figure in the development of the U.S. Navy Academy (USNA). Chauvenet was among those who strongly advocated for the creation of USNA and, after its establishment in 1845, he founded this service academy’s mathematics department.

The second survey ship bearing Chauvenet’s name was constructed for the U.S. Navy by the Glasgow-based consortium known as Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS). The launch of this vessel  took place at UCS’s shipyard on the south bank of the River Clyde within Glasgow’s district of Govan. The christening duties for this launch were handled by Mrs. Ray Reynoir Kirn; her husband was Lewis J. Kirn, a U.S. Navy rear admiral serving at the time as the American naval attaché in London. Chauvenet was officially delivered to the U.S. Navy on November 13, 1970, and placed in service with MSC.

This ship was subsequently used to conduct a variety of coastal hydrographic and topographic surveys under the technical direction of the Naval Oceanographic Office, which is part of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command. Chauvenet was primarily deployed for surveys in the Pacific region. (The attached photo of Chauvenet carrying out one such mission in the Sulu Sea, a body of water in the southwestern area of the Philippines, was taken in 1985.) The technology on board the vessel for these assignments included an early type of shipboard data acquisition and processing software that was designated as the Hydrographic Data Acquisition System.  

Chauvenet was used for these surveys until being inactivated on November 7, 1992, and placed in the National Defense Reserve Fleet (NDRF) of the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD), an agency of the U.S. Department of Transportation. On February16, 1994, the title of the ship was formally transferred from the U.S. Navy to MARAD.

This vessel was modified by MARAD to serve as a 260-berth training ship to be used by Texas A&M University, Galveston. She was renamed Texas Clipper II and began her first cruise as a training ship on June 3, 1997. Texas Clipper II continued in this role until she became part of NDRF’s Beaumont Reserve Fleet (based in the Lone Star State) on July 26, 2005. Between September 2005 and March 2006, she was used in the wake of Hurricane Rita in the Gulf of Mexico region to house workers involved in disaster relief efforts and also to provide temporary refuge for evacuees.  

Following this emergency service, the vessel originally called USNS Chauvenet was reconverted by MARAD for deployment as an instrumentation ship of the Missile Defense Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. The ship’s name was changed to MV Pacific Collector and, with Portland, Oregon, as her home base, she is one of the Missile Defense Agency’s seagoing platforms for collecting and recording vital test data.

Photo Credit: Public Domain

For more information on the ship originally known as USNS Chauvenet (T-AGS-29), please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USNS_Chauvenet_(T-AGS-29)