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USNS Powhatan (T-ATF 166)

Named after the American Indian tribe, the USNS POWHATAN was the lead ship of the POWHATAN - class of seven ocean tugs. Decommissioned on February 26, 1999, the POWHATAN was subsequently leased to an unknown organisation. Leasing details were not available. On June 12, 2008, the POWHATAN was transfered to the Turkish Navy were she was recommissioned as INEBOLU (A 590).

The USNS POWHATAN was equipped with a 10-ton capacity crane and a bollard pull of at least 54 tons. A deck grid was fitted aft which contained 1 inch bolt receptacles spaced 24 inches apart. That allowed for the bolting down of a wide variety of portable equipment. There were two GPH fire pumps supplying three fire monitors with up to 2,200 gallons of foam per minute. A deep module could be embarked to support naval salvage teams.

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Crew List:

This section contains the names of sailors who served aboard USNS POWHATAN. It is no official listing but contains the names of sailors who submitted their information.

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USNS POWHATAN History:

USNS POWHATAN was ordered as the lead ship of a new class of fleet ocean tugs to modernize the U.S. Navy's heavy towing and salvage capability during the late Cold War. The contract for the first four units went to Marinette Marine on September 12, 1975. Her keel was laid at Marinette, Wisconsin, on September 30, 1976; she was launched on June 24, 1978 and christened on October 28, 1978. Delivered to the Military Sealift Command on June 15, 1979, POWHATAN entered service with a civilian mariner crew and began East Coast and Atlantic duties, ranging from deep-sea tows to participation in Navy diving and salvage evolutions. Early imagery places her at the Washington Navy Yard on June 17, 1980, after a transit of the Anacostia River, underscoring her routine employment in the mid-Atlantic support circuit and periodic work in the Hampton Roads-Little Creek operating area.

Through 1981-1982, the tug figured in a complex international salvage effort in the Azores. In the autumn of 1981, heavy-lift pontoons known as ECHO and GOLF grounded against lava cliffs near Ponta Delgada, Sao Miguel. A task element formed under Commander Service Squadron Eight brought together USS RECOVERY (ARS 43), detachments from USS OPPORTUNE (ARS 41) and Harbor Clearance Unit Two, the German ocean tug M/V SIMSON, and POWHATAN as ocean-tow platform. After staged sealing, dewatering, and helo-supported equipment lifts between November 6 and November 12, one pontoon was freed to the quay, and recovery planning shifted to heavy transport. The commercial submersible barge SUBLIFT ATLANTIC arrived December 30. On January 7, 1982, POWHATAN sailed with SUBLIFT ATLANTIC and the re-embarked ECHO pontoon in tow for return to the United States, while M/V BULWARK departed on January 11 with the second unit. The episode typified the ship's early Cold War brief: long-range ocean towing fused with Navy/industry salvage integration across NATO waters.

In 1983, POWHATAN was documented alongside at Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, Virginia (October 1, 1983), a routine posture between taskings that often included target sled work, exercises with East Coast amphibious and surface forces, and readiness towing for tests and trials. By mid-1985, she was assigned a demanding assist in the Chesapeake. After USS BOULDER (LST 1190) grounded and lay beached, POWHATAN embarked a Navy dive team and, in late July into early August 1985, supported the refloat effort that ultimately put the tank landing ship back to sea. That autumn, the tug undertook a trans-Caribbean dead-ship tow: in November 1985, POWHATAN was ordered to take the decommissioned submarine ex-SALMON (AGSS 573) from Panama to Norfolk for antisubmarine test duties. En route off Haiti the submarine's rudder-locking gear failed, threatening the stability of the tow. Temporary repairs at sea enabled the convoy to reach Guantanamo Bay safely for permanent fixes. The tug and tow departed Cuba on November 20, 1985, and completed the delivery northward without further incident.

In October 1986, at the height of U.S.-Soviet maritime competition and just weeks after the Reykjavik summit, POWHATAN was dispatched to stand by the stricken Soviet ballistic-missile submarine K-219, which had suffered an explosion and fire northeast of Bermuda. The United States offered assistance on humanitarian and safety grounds. Soviet authorities instructed the American tug to keep clear, and the submarine later sank in deep water. POWHATAN's presence reflected MSC's role in contingency response and the era's nuclear-safety sensitivities, including environmental sampling to detect any release.

With the Cold War ending, POWHATAN's work shifted toward repositioning large U.S. Navy hulks for lay-up, donation, or disposal. In May 1995, she towed the decommissioned aircraft carrier ex-SARATOGA (CV 60) from Naval Station Mayport to the Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility at Philadelphia, a signature post-drawdown move as carrier homeports consolidated. On September 14, 1998, she towed ex-FORRESTAL (CV 59) from Philadelphia to Naval Station Newport, Rhode Island, following the Philadelphia yard's closure and the redistribution of inactive hulls to other berths.

Budget pressure on auxiliary fleets led the Navy to inactivate POWHATAN on February 26, 1999, and lease her to Donjon Marine for commercial towing and salvage under Navy recall provisions. Within months, she was engaged on international government work: under a Turkish contract in 1999, POWHATAN executed trans-Atlantic tows of decommissioned U.S. Navy ships, including the former frigate ex-MILLER (FF 1091), for handover at Gölcük. That same September, in domestic emergency service during Hurricane Floyd, the tug sailed from Charleston to recover the 750-foot container barge JAX SAN JUAN BRIDGE after it broke loose in the storm, an operation framed by the broader East Coast disaster response between September 14 and 17, 1999. Two years later, on September 11, 2001, POWHATAN joined scores of tugs and ferries in New York Harbor to move stranded commuters and essential personnel off Manhattan in the spontaneous maritime evacuation that unfolded in the hours after the attacks.

Commercial chartering put the tug back into Navy-adjacent service repeatedly. On February 28, 2004, when the chemical tanker BOW MARINER exploded and sank about 45 miles off the Virginia coast, POWHATAN was outfitted with an inspection-class ROV and deployed with a small salvage team to survey the wreck and support oil-pollution response in a high-stakes casualty that claimed 21 lives. In the spring of 2005, she undertook one of the largest deep-sea tows ever assigned to a tug of her size: on April 19, 2005, the decommissioned supercarrier ex-AMERICA (CV 66) left Philadelphia under tow for a classified series of full-scale survivability trials at sea. After roughly four weeks of instrumented underwater and above-water explosive testing, the carrier was scuttled on May 14, 2005, in deep Atlantic water. Later that year, in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, POWHATAN shifted with a crane barge to the northern Gulf of Mexico to assist Navy Supervisor of Salvage operations clearing and recovering critical infrastructure along the Louisiana coast.

In 2007, the tug again moved a former carrier, towing ex-JOHN F. KENNEDY (CV 67) from Mayport beginning July 26, 2007, to Philadelphia, Penn., where the ship entered long-term lay-up pending disposition. After nine years of commercial service, the Navy struck POWHATAN on February 25, 2008, and sold her the next day to Turkey under the Security Assistance Program. A turnover ceremony in Charleston in mid-2008 accompanied a refit that included complete rebuilding of main engines and ship's service generators to return the vessel to naval standards. Commissioned by the Turkish Naval Forces as TCG INEBOLU (A 590) in 2008 and homeported at Gölcük, the former U.S. tug resumed government towing, rescue, and test-support duties in the eastern Mediterranean.

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