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USS Rehoboth (AVP-50, later AGS-50), 1944-1970

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USS Rehoboth, a 1,766-ton Barnegat class small seaplane tender built at Houghton, Washington, was commissioned in February 1944. Following shakedown training at San Diego, she transited to the East Coast, arriving at Norfolk in May. After two voyages to deliver aviation-related cargo and personnel to Europe, she reported for duty in Brazil. Between September 1944 and January 1945 she transported passengers and cargo between various Brazilian ports. She then resumed her support of naval aviation forces in Europe, completing at least two more round trip voyages by mid-June.

Rehoboth returned to the Pacific in August 1945. Arriving at Okinawa in October, she tended planes of an air-sea rescue squadron for two weeks. She then proceeded to Korea, where she operated a seadrome and tended aircraft for the next month. Moving on to the China coast, she tended aircraft in the Yellow Sea and at Shanghai through January 1946. Between February and August she operated seadromes and tended aircraft at Kobe and Sasebo, Japan. In late 1946 she made a cruise to the China Coast, Australia, and the Philippines. Returning to the United States from Japan in early 1947, she arrived at Philadelphia in April and decommissioned there in June.

Rehoboth was one of two AVPs reactivated in September 1948 for service as hydrographic survey ships. She and her sister San Pablo (AVP-30) were converted during reactivation but were only reclassified AGS-50 and AGS-30 respectively in August 1949. Rehoboth was equipped with a small laboratory and equipment to take Nansen casts, which measured the temperature and took samples of sea water at different depths and drilled core samples of the ocean bottom. Between early 1949 and 1955 she traveled over 300,000 miles performing oceanographic survey and special project work in the North Atlantic and adjacent areas, including the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Baltic, North, and Norwegian Seas.

Following an extensive overhaul at Philadelphia, Rehoboth arrived in the Pacific in February 1956 and commenced operations that ultimately covered much of the Pacific basin. Beginning in the eastern Pacific and Hawaiian region, she extended her activities to the Marshall Islands in 1958, the Western Pacific and the South American coast in 1960, the Northern Pacific in the early 1960s, the South China Sea in 1965, and the Philippine Sea in 1968. She returned from her final deployment in December 1969, was decommissioned in April 1970, and sold for scrap in September 1970.

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