US FWS Hugh M. Smith was an American fisheries science research vessel in commission from 1949 to 1959 in the fleet of the United States Department of the Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service. She was among the first U.S. fisheries science vessels to explore the central Pacific Ocean in search of commercially valuable populations of fish.
Prior to her time in the Fish and Wildlife Service, the vessel was in commission in the United States Navy as the patrol vessel USS YP-635. After her Fish and Wildlife Service career ended, she was leased to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1959 to 1963, then operated in American Samoa during the mid-1960s, and finally served the Philippine Merchant Marine Academy as the laboratory training ship Habagat from 1965 until she capsized in a storm in the late 1970s.
U.S. Navy Construction
The Ballard Marine Railway Company built the vessel as the U.S. Navy patrol boat YP-635 at Seattle, Washington, in 1945.NavSource NavSource Online: Service Ship Photo Archive YP-635 Accessed 12 August 2021shipbuildinghistory.com Patrol and Training Craft (YP) October 22, 2015 Accessed 12 August 2021 As completed, she was listed as in length, with a displacement of 403 tons.
Service history
The vessel was commissioned into U.S. Navy service as USS YP-635 near the end of World War II in May 1945. The war ended in August 1945, and sometime afterward YP-635 was decommissioned and laid up in reserve.
Honors and awards
YP-635 received the following awards for her World War II service:
American Campaign Medal World War II Victory Medal
Fish and Wildlife Service In August 1947, the United States Congress authorized a new Pacific Ocean Fishery Program calling for the "investigation, exploration, and development of the high seas fisheries of the Territories and Island Possessions [of the United States] and intervening areas in the tropical and subtropical Pacific Ocean."Commercial Fisheries Review, October 1948, p. 27. The United States Department of the Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service (which in 1956 would become the United States Fish and Wildlife Service) was responsible for carrying out the program, which was to be overseen by a new Pacific Ocean Fishery Investigation (POFI) under the direction of Oscar Elton Sette. In addition to the construction of the Pacific Ocean Fisheries Laboratory at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu in the Territory of Hawaii and the development of a Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) docking and warehouse site at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the Congress funded the conversion or construction of three ocean-going vessels to support POFI's work. During 1949 and 1950, these three vessels joined the Fish and Wildlife Service fleet as , US FWS Hugh M. Smith, and .
Acquisition, conversion, and commissioning The U.S. Navy transferred YP-635 to the FWS in November 1948. She then underwent conversion into a fisheries science research vessel.Commercial Fisheries Review, March 1949, p. 35. Her conversion was completed in Tacoma, Washington, in November 1949,Commercial Fisheries Review, November 1949, p. 30.Commercial Fisheries Review, December 1949, p. 31. and the FWS commissioned her that month as US FWS Hugh M. Smith,Commercial Fisheries Review, March 1950, p. 4. named for Hugh McCormick Smith (1865–1941), who led the United States Bureau of Fisheries as the Commissioner of Fisheries from 1913 to 1922.Galtsoff, p. 115. Unlike the other two POFI vessels, Henry O'Malley and John R. Manning, which were fitted out as exploratory fishing vessels, Hugh M. Smith was configured as a biological and oceanographic research vessel, intended to study the life histories and habits of the tunas of the central Pacific Ocean.
As converted, Hugh M. Smith was equipped with laboratory facilities, an oceanographic winch for use in studying plankton and water temperature, live bait tanks, refrigerated holds, and an auxiliary propulsion motor that allowed her to operate at the low speeds necessary to carry out many of her scientific activities. Her fishing gear included a bait net, a bait net, and a bait net.
Service history 1949 Hugh M. Smith departed Seattle on 15 November 1949 bound for Honolulu, the second of the three fisheries research vessels the FWS assigned to POFI to enter service. After arriving in Hawaii, she put back to sea on 8 December 1949 for her first FWS cruise, a 16-day shakedown cruise in the waters of the Hawaiian Islands to test her equipment — including special equipment for catching tuna, gathering fish eggs, fish larvae, and other biological materials, and taking water samples at depth — and train her crew in fisheries research work.Commercial Fisheries Review, January 1950, p. 33. She operated south of Maui and off the Kona Coast of the island of Hawaii, and took a series of observations of ocean currents — which were believed to influence the occurrence of tuna — at stations extending from the coast of the island of Hawaii to a point to the southwest .
1950 On 16 January 1950, Hugh M. Smith departed Pearl Harbor for her second FWS cruise.Commercial Fisheries Review, March 1950, p. 44.Commercial Fisheries Review, May 1950, p. 35. Her itinerary took her first to the French Frigate Shoals in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, where she spent 19–25 January looking for bait fish. Weather conditions permitted searches for bait on only four days and she had little success, sighting a small school of iao (Hepsetia insularum) off Tern Island on 19 January and catching five buckets of iao off East Island on 25 January, which she placed in her live bait tanks.Commercial Fisheries Review, May 1950, p. 37. The lack of bait contrasted sharply with the amount of bait reported by FWS researchers aboard the fishing vessel Oregon during a January 1948 visit to the French Frigate Shoals, indicating the necessity for further research into seasonal meteorological effects on the bait fish.
Hugh M. Smith then headed south to the Phoenix Islands, collecting data along the way at hydrographic stations between the French Frigate Shoals and , making the last of these observations on 7 February 1950. Her crew found little mortality among the iao in her bait tanks after reaching 5 degrees South, indicating the practicality of transporting them from Hawaii to the equatorial region. After reaching the Phoenix Islands, she conducted a preliminary reconnaissance of Hull Island on 8 February, seeing indications of bait fish in the lagoon and catching five yellowfin offshore, looked for bait in the lagoon at Canton Island on 9–10 February, where she captured of mullet, and then fished for tuna off Canton on 11 February, using the mullet for bait. She caught only 25 tuna, although her crew sighted skipjack tuna and yellowfin tuna off the island and a large school of skipjack in the open ocean southwest of Honolulu at . She also took aboard a United States Weather Bureau observer at Canton Island and gathered meteorological and hydrographic data near the equator.Commercial Fisheries Review, March 1950, p. 45. She then proceeded east to the Line Islands, and on 18 February 1950 began another set of observations at hydrographic stations between and Oahu as she proceeded north, completing her last observations on 28 February. Despite stormy weather, she took water samples and temperatures at a total of 50 hydrographic stations across the North Equatorial Current, South Equatorial Current, and Equatorial Counter Current during her cruise at depth ranging from the surface to to gather data for the oceanographic study of the central Pacific Ocean, which directly affected the growth and behavior of fish. At each station, Hugh M. Smith also took plankton samples between the surface and , both to gather information on the quantity of zooplankton — a food source for fishes — and their correlation with physical and chemical oceanography in the central Pacific and to aid in locating tuna spawning grounds by searching for tuna eggs and larvae.Commercial Fisheries Review, May 1950, p. 36. She also engaged in night-light fishing while hove to on hydrographic sections, finding success in catching fishes and squids for use in comparison to the contents of tuna stomachs. She returned to Pearl Harbor on 2 March 1950 after 44 days at sea, bringing back tuna stomachs, sections of vertebrae, and female gonads for the study of dietary habits, growth and age, and sexual maturity.
Hugh M. Smith′s third cruise took place in Hawaiian waters.Commercial Fisheries Review, May 1950, p. 38. She tested an experimental type of flag-line fishing gear equipped with buoys that made hooks float at specified depths to allow the investigation of the effect of subsurface temperatures on the vertical distribution of tuna and improve predictions as to the location of the best fishing. She also tested a type of Japanese line-hauling gear that automatically coiled lines that otherwise were coiled by hand, finding the gear worked very well, and measured water temperatures at depths of up to to correlate water conditions with success in catching fish. She returned to Pearl Harbor on 22 April 1950 after three weeks at sea.
Hugh M. Smith also spent her fourth cruise off Hawaii, departing Pearl Harbor on 10 May 1950 and returning 22 days later on 2 June.Commercial Fisheries Review, June 1950, p. 22. During the voyage, she sampled waters within of Hawaii with fine-meshed nets in a search for tuna eggs and young, finding many eggs and small fish, including small sailfish in length. In addition, she experimented with methods of tagging tuna, tagging 20 skipjack and small yellowfin, and kept three skipjack alive in her live well for the last two days of the cruise. She also engaged in exploratory fishing, catching approximately of bait fish — nehu (a small anchovy), iao, and mosquito fish — and using them to catch 162 skipjack and 82 dolphin fish.
Hugh M. Smith got underway from Pearl Harbor for her fifth cruise on 16 June 1950. She first visited the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands to search for bait and found iao and piha (Spratelloides delicatulus) in all localities but never in quantities that warranted bait fishing. She then embarked on fulfilling her cruise's primary objective of repeating the hydrographic and planktonic observations across the equatorial and counter equatorial currents between Hawaii and 5 degrees South she had made in January and February during her second cruise, allowing a comparison of observations made in midwinter with those of midsummer to shed light on the seasonal changes in the positions and speeds of the currents and in upwellings.Commercial Fisheries Review, July 1950, p. 29; September 1950, pp. 20–21. She made observations at 51 hydrographic stations during the outbound and return legs of her cruise, taking water samples from as deep as to determine levels of salinity, dissolved oxygen, and inorganic phosphates and producing 502 bathythermograms.Commercial Fisheries Review, September 1950, p. 20. At each station, she also made a plankton haul between the surface and a depth of Commercial Fisheries Review, September 1950, p. 21. and engaged in night-light fishing while hove to at the stations to collect specimens of fish and invertebrates useful for comparison in analyzing the contents of tuna stomachs.