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USS Champion (MCM 4)

USS CHAMPION was the fourth ship in the AVENGER class of Mine Countermeasures Ships and also the fourth ship in the Navy to bear the name. During her almost 30 years of service, the CHAMPION has mainly operated along the US east and west coasts and in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1999, she completed a 5-month Mediterranean deployment. In 2009, the CHAMPION shifted her homeport from Ingleside, Tx., to San Diego, Calif., where she was subsequently used to train crews for her forward-deployed sisterships. USS CHAMPION held a decommissioning ceremony at Naval Base San Diego, Calif., on August 18, 2020, and was officially decommissioned on August 25, 2020. In September 2023, Marine Group Boat Works of San Diego, Calif., was awarded a $9,351,700 firm-fixed-price contract for the dismantling of CHAMPION along with her two decommissioned sisterships SCOUT (MCM 8) and ARDENT (MCM 12).

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Crew List:

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

• Click here to view the list.

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• Click here to see which USS CHAMPION memorabilia are currently for sale on ebay.

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USS CHAMPION Cruise Books:

• Decommissioning Cruise Book 2020

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USS CHAMPION in the News:

• January 24, 2003 - Champion Rescues Navy Veteran on the High Seas

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Accidents aboard USS CHAMPION:

Date	Where	Events
November 29, 2019	Naval Base San Diego, Calif.	USS CHAMPION suffers a main engine room fire at about 10 a.m. The crew, assisted by federal and local firefighters, take about 2 hours to extinguish the fire. One sailor is treated for smoke inhalation and a federal firefighter suffers heat-related injuries. The damage photos below are from the USS CHAMPION Decommissioning Cruise Book 2020:

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USS CHAMPION History:

USS CHAMPION, the fourth U.S. Navy ship to bear the name, was laid down on June 28, 1984, at Marinette Marine Corporation in Marinette, Wisconsin, at a time when the Navy was investing heavily in dedicated mine countermeasures forces in response to the damage that Iraqi mines had inflicted on U.S. ships during the Iran-Iraq War and Operation Desert Storm. After several years of construction and fitting out, she was launched on April 15, 1989 and completed trials and final outfitting before entering active service. CHAMPION was commissioned on February 8, 1991, and assigned to the Active Naval Reserve, Mine Countermeasures Squadron Two in the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, joining the newly built AVENGER-class wooden-hulled minehunters and sweepers that formed the core of the Navy's modern mine warfare capability.

In her first years after commissioning in the early 1990s, CHAMPION operated primarily from the dedicated mine-warfare homeport at Ingleside, Texas, and other Atlantic Fleet facilities, working up her crew and systems, qualifying in mine-hunting and mine-sweeping tactics, and integrating with the mine warfare community. Command-operations reports from these years describe routine cycles of local operations, training and maintenance as she took her place as an integral unit of the Navy's mine warfare forces, while the wider U.S. fleet shifted from blue-water Cold War scenarios to littoral operations and post-Cold War regional crises.

Throughout the decade, official summaries note that CHAMPION's operating pattern centered on the U.S. East and West Coasts and the Gulf of Mexico rather than repeated long overseas deployments, reflecting the Navy's decision to keep some AVENGER-class ships stateside as training and readiness assets while sister ships forward-deployed to places such as Bahrain and Japan.

By 1998, CHAMPION was approaching the midpoint of her planned service life and entered a major maintenance and modernization period. According to her 1998 command history, she began that year in Gulf Copper Marine drydock at Ingleside, Texas, and remained there through February 9 while undergoing an extensive Docking Phased Maintenance Availability that focused on intrusive combat-systems work and engineering repairs. This yard period allowed shipyard workers and ship's force to overhaul propulsion and auxiliary systems and to inspect and repair her wooden, fiberglass-sheathed hull, which was critical to preserving her low magnetic signature. After refloating and returning to the pier at Ingleside, CHAMPION spent the remainder of 1998 in post-availability testing, local operations and preparations for a more demanding deployment schedule, reflecting the growing emphasis on mine countermeasures readiness as NATO and U.S. planners watched instability in the Balkans and elsewhere.

CHAMPION's 1999 calendar year opened with a holiday stand-down and upkeep period moored at Naval Station Ingleside from January 1 through February 23, as recorded in her 1999 command-operations report. In the months that followed, she left the Texas coast for what became the best-documented overseas deployment of her career: a five-month deployment to the Mediterranean. During this cruise, in the context of the Kosovo crisis and NATO's Operation Allied Force and follow-on humanitarian efforts, CHAMPION was employed not only in her traditional mine warfare role but also in supporting the evacuation of ethnic Albanian refugees from war-torn Kosovo. Open sources do not provide a full port-by-port itinerary for this deployment, but it is clear that CHAMPION operated with allied forces in the central and eastern Mediterranean, integrating mine countermeasures capabilities into a theater where the alliance had to be prepared for the possibility of naval mining in choke points and approaches to embarkation and evacuation ports.

After returning from the Mediterranean at the end of 1999, CHAMPION resumed operations centered on the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. coastal waters. Her 2000 command history, records her operating in the Gulf of Mexico and en route to Naval Station Ingleside as part of Mine Warfare Readiness Group Two, reflecting a pattern of group training and readiness exercises designed to keep U.S. mine warfare forces at a high level of proficiency.

In the summer of 2002, CHAMPION participated in one of the better documented of these large-scale training events, "Gulf of Mexico Exercise 02-2" conducted near Corpus Christi, Texas. Between July 15 and July 26, 2002, she operated in the Gulf alongside other mine countermeasures assets, and a Navy image from July 22, 2002, shows her crew preparing to lower the AN/SLQ-48 mine neutralization vehicle over the side. The remotely operated vehicle, controlled from CHAMPION using sonar and video, was used during the exercise to locate and identify underwater objects and, when simulated mines were detected, to place small explosive charges nearby to neutralize them. The exercise demonstrated the integration of high-resolution sonar, remotely operated neutralization vehicles and traditional sweeping gear, and it underscored how CHAMPION and her sister ships functioned as testbeds for evolving mine warfare technology in shallow, confined waters similar to those of potential future combat zones.

Shortly after this Gulf exercise, CHAMPION left the Gulf of Mexico on one of her few extended deployments to another oceanic theater. On October 17, 2002, she departed Ingleside in company with the mine countermeasures ship USS PIONEER (MCM 9) for a six-month deployment to the eastern Pacific. The two ships operated primarily in the eastern Pacific approaches to Central America, a region that in the early 2000s was a focus of U.S. Southern Command and U.S. Coast Guard efforts against narcotics trafficking and other maritime security challenges. While the mine warfare ships' primary specialization was mine countermeasures, this deployment underscored their flexibility as small, shallow-draft platforms able to support a variety of security cooperation, surveillance and training tasks alongside regional partners and other U.S. units.

A dramatic event from this deployment was recorded in detail by Navy public affairs. On January 24, 2003, while CHAMPION and PIONEER were transiting between Balboa, Panama, and Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala, they received a distress call from the disabled 32-foot pleasure trawler MOONLIGHTER, whose sole engine had failed roughly 40 nautical miles off the Central American coast. CHAMPION altered course, closed the position in rough seas after dark, launched her rigid-hulled inflatable boat with a search-and-rescue swimmer and an engineer, and attempted repairs on the trawler's engine. When it became clear that MOONLIGHTER could not safely make port under her own power, CHAMPION took the vessel under tow, ultimately towing her for more than 100 nautical miles before transferring the tow to the Nicaraguan Coast Guard and a commercial tug for delivery to a repair facility. The episode, occurring in the midst of her eastern Pacific deployment, illustrated how a mine countermeasures ship normally focused on specialized warfare tasks could be called upon for classic seafaring rescue duties in support of mariners in distress.

Back in home waters later in the decade, CHAMPION continued to operate primarily from Ingleside and, after the closure of that base, from San Diego, with a focus on training and technology. In recognition of her crew's stewardship of the marine environment and compliance with increasingly stringent environmental regulations, CHAMPION was awarded the Chief of Naval Operations Environmental Quality Small Ship Award for Fiscal Year 2004, an award announced in 2005 and credited specifically to "USS CHAMPION, MCM Crew DELTA, Ingleside, Texas". The award highlighted efforts such as proper hazardous-waste handling, spill prevention, and shipboard environmental management at a time when the Navy was placing renewed emphasis on minimizing the ecological footprint of its operations.

The turn of the decade brought a major geographic shift for CHAMPION. With the implementation of Base Realignment and Closure decisions that shuttered Naval Station Ingleside as the mine warfare homeport, CHAMPION shifted her homeport from Ingleside, Texas, to Naval Station San Diego, California, in 2009. A Navy photograph dated May 22, 2009, shows CHAMPION arriving at Naval Base San Diego after participating in search efforts for an HH-60 Sea Hawk helicopter that had gone down off the coast of southern California on May 19. The image caption makes clear that she was simultaneously conducting that search mission and completing her homeport shift, arriving in San Diego as part of the mine countermeasures force's consolidation on the West Coast. From that point onward, CHAMPION's operations fell under the purview of Commander, Mine Countermeasures Squadron, and her routine activities were centered on the Pacific coast rather than the Gulf of Mexico.

In this role she became an important platform for the continuous improvement of mine warfare technologies and for training crews destined for forward-deployed AVENGER-class ships based in Bahrain and Japan. Crews cycled through CHAMPION to gain hands-on experience with mine-hunting sonar, neutralization vehicles and associated command-and-control systems before joining units in the Fifth and Seventh Fleets, linking her day-to-day operations in U.S. coastal waters directly to the Navy's global posture in critical chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz and the approaches to key Asian ports. Industry literature from this period also describes CHAMPION supporting oceanic survey work with advanced sonar systems under her commanding officer, identified as Cmdr. Kristenson, illustrating her use as a test and evaluation platform for new undersea sensing techniques aimed at maintaining clear maritime communication and navigation routes.

In October 2017, she steamed north along the U.S. Pacific coast to participate in Fleet Week San Francisco. On October 10, 2017, she was photographed and filmed departing San Francisco at the conclusion of Fleet Week, having spent several days moored on the city's waterfront, open for public tours and participating in the parade of ships alongside units from the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and allied navies such as the Royal Canadian Navy's HMCS WINNIPEG.

As she approached the end of her service life, CHAMPION continued local and regional training operations from San Diego in support of the mine warfare force, while the Navy prepared to transition the mine countermeasures mission from legacy wooden-hulled ships to Littoral Combat Ship-based mission packages. In August 2020, the Navy formally retired her. A decommissioning ceremony was held at Naval Base San Diego on August 18, 2020, at which Rear Adm. Scott Robertson, Commander, Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center, and Capt. Hank Kim, Commander, Mine Division Twelve, highlighted CHAMPION's nearly three decades of service, including her support to the evacuation of refugees from Kosovo and her long contribution to fleet mine warfare readiness. Official records note that CHAMPION was decommissioned and stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on August 25, 2020. In September 2023, Marine Group Boat Works of San Diego, Calif., was awarded a $9,351,700 firm-fixed-price contract for the dismantling of ex-CHAMPION along with her two decommissioned sisterships SCOUT (MCM 8) and ARDENT (MCM 12).

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USS CHAMPION Image Gallery:

The photos below were taken by me and show the CHAMPION at Naval Base San Diego, Calif., on September 29, 2011.

The photo below was taken by me and shows the CHAMPION undergoing maintenance at San Diego, Calif., on March 15, 2012.

The photo below was taken by me and shows the CHAMPION near the end of her maintenance period at San Diego, Calif., on May 10, 2012.

The photos below were taken by Michael Jenning and show the CHAMPION at Naval Base San Diego, Calif., on October 2, 2015.

The photos below were taken by Michael Jenning and show the CHAMPION at Naval Base San Diego, Calif., on April 18, 2016.

The photo below was taken by Sebastian Thoma and shows the CHAMPION at Naval Base San Diego, Calif., on December 20, 2016.

The photos below were taken by Michael Jenning and show the CHAMPION during the Parade of Ships during Fleet Week San Francisco on October 6, 2017.

The photos below were taken by Michael Jenning on October 8, 2017, during an open ship event aboard USS CHAMPION as part of Fleet Week San Francisco.

The photo below was taken by Michael Jenning and shows the CHAMPION at Naval Base San Diego, Calif., on March 2, 2019.

The photos below were taken by Michael Jenning and show the decommissioned CHAMPION laid up at Naval Base San Diego, Calif., on December 28, 2021.

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