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USNS Apache (T-ATF 172)

USNS APACHE was the last of the POWHATAN - class ocean tugs and the fifth ship in the Navy to bear the name.

The APACHE 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 APACHE. It is no official listing but contains the names of sailors who submitted their information.

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USNS APACHE History:

USNS APACHE entered Military Sealift Command service in 1981 as a 226-foot POWHATAN-class fleet ocean tug built at Marinette Marine, purpose-designed for long-range ocean tows, diving/salvage support, and emergency response. Early in her career she performed several "dead-ship" tows of high-visibility hulls that signaled the breadth of her mission set: in September 1982, she took the recommissioning-candidate battleship ex-USS IOWA (BB 61) from Philadelphia to Westwego, Louisiana; in November 1983, she brought the destroyer ex-USS BARRY (DD 933) up the Potomac to her museum berth at the Washington Navy Yard; and in the closing months of 1990, she moved ex-USS CHARLES F. ADAMS (DDG 2) from Mayport to Philadelphia and the retired carrier ex-USS CORAL SEA (CV 43) from Norfolk to Philadelphia, typical of the heavy tows MSC assigned to the class. These early Atlantic and East Coast evolutions entrenched APACHE as a workhorse support ship for the Navy's inactive-ship logistics and salvage community.

Through the early and mid-1990s, APACHE increasingly shifted from domestic logistics to operational support for U.S. foreign policy in littoral theaters. During the U.S.-led humanitarian intervention in Somalia she earned Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal credit for participation in Operation Restore Hope in 1993-1994, reflecting her role as an MSC tug available to stage or move equipment and support diving/salvage contingencies around the Horn of Africa. Two years later, she supported Caribbean operations connected to U.S. efforts in Haiti (credited to Operation Uphold Democracy), a pattern of presence that aligned with the expeditionary amphibious force posture of the era.

A dramatic tow in home waters followed when, on December 1, 1996, APACHE arrived in Norfolk with USS GONZALEZ (DDG 66) secured astern after the destroyer had damaged both screws on a coral reef overseas. The tug delivered the warship safely to shipyard repairs, underscoring the fleet's dependence on MSC salvage assets for casualty response.

On a Sixth Fleet transit in November 2001, APACHE diverted in the North Atlantic and rescued four sailors from an 80-foot sailboat about 1,400 miles southwest of the Azores - a textbook demonstration of blue-water search-and-rescue while the tug was en route to a Mediterranean deployment. The following year, she shifted to combined training, embarking a detachment from Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit TWO and running a bilateral diving/salvage exercise with the Croatian Navy off Split from September 20-30, 2002.

From late 2002 into 2003, APACHE continued Sixth Fleet workups and pre-deployment training in the Atlantic. On September 10, 2003, the cruiser USS PHILIPPINE SEA (CG 58) used APACHE as a cooperative "target" for maritime interdiction practice boardings during ENTERPRISE (CVN 65) Carrier Strike Group workups, a routine but revealing snapshot of how the tug was integrated into fleet certification events.

APACHE's tow ledger in the mid-2000s again grew dense. In February 2005, she moved the decommissioned fast combat support ship ex-USS DETROIT (AOE 4) from Naval Weapons Station Earle to Philadelphia for lay-up. She subsequently supported additional inactive-ship moves as required by NAVSEA.

Her 2006 Sixth Fleet deployment was especially busy and geopolitically textured. After operating with French, Croatian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Israeli partners, APACHE's Haifa port call ended abruptly on July 13, 2006, when the ship sailed as a precaution at the outbreak of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. She then shifted to West Africa, arriving at Sekondi, Ghana, on September 3, 2006, to begin a joint diving/salvage exercise with the Ghanaian Navy under U.S. maritime partnership initiatives. Between those events she conducted consequential port-services work at Monrovia, Liberia, entering on August 9, 2006, to survey harbor wrecks and assist with pier repairs. On August 10, she evacuated the crew of the Estonian freighter TAHOMA REEFER and helped fight a shipboard fire, and on August 14 she rescued seven fishermen whose canoe had capsized off the Liberian coast. The deployment illustrated how an ocean tug could touch deterrence, coalition capacity-building, and civil assistance in quick succession.

Inactive-ship moves resumed in the latter 2000s. After the amphibious transport dock USS SHREVEPORT (LPD 12) decommissioned on September 26, 2007, APACHE towed her from Norfolk to the Philadelphia Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility in October 2007, closing a 37-year service life for the LPD.

In June 2010, APACHE towed the retired supercarrier ex-USS FORRESTAL (CV 59) from Naval Station Newport to Philadelphia, a three-day coastal evolution captured in Navy imagery. That summer, she also served as a diving platform off the U.S. East Coast for Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit TWO mixed-gas dives - another example of the tug's dual personality as heavy-tow workhorse and afloat base for divers.

APACHE's most publicized mission came after the loss of the U.S.-flagged containership EL FARO near the Bahamas. She departed Norfolk on October 19, 2015, for the search area northeast of Crooked Island. By October 31, she and embarked Navy/contractor teams had located the wreck about 15,400 feet down using deep-tow sonar. After documenting the site and confirming the hull, APACHE returned in 2016 with the Navy's CURV-21 remotely operated vehicle to conduct a grid search for the voyage data recorder. The VDR was recovered on August 8, 2016, enabling investigators to reconstruct the final hours of the casualty with unusual fidelity.

In April 2021, the tug completed another hallmark "dead-ship" evolution, towing the decommissioned dock landing ship ex-USS FORT McHENRY (LSD 43) from Mayport to Philadelphia (April 16-21) for inactivation processing.

USNS APACHE was inactivated at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story on August 26, 2022, with the ship stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on September 30, 2022. The ceremony capped more than four decades of work that spanned blue-water rescue in the Atlantic, multinational training around the Mediterranean and Black Sea approaches, humanitarian and capacity-building tasks on the Gulf of Guinea littoral, and a lengthy list of inactive-ship towings along the U.S. East Coast.

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