USFS Osprey was an American steamer that served as a fishery patrol vessel in the waters of the Territory of Alaska.

[2] This approach was not satisfactory for various reasons, such as the requirement for vessels of other government agencies to perform non-fishery-related functions, ethical concerns over accepting transportation from the canneries the BOF agents were supposed to regulate, and the difficulty of enforcing regulations when the local fishing and canning industry personnel warned one another of the approach of BOF agents who had accepted transportation on cannery vessels.

[2] Each year after the 1906 passage of the Alien Fisheries Act, the BOF requested more personnel and vessels with which to fulfill its regulatory and law enforcement responsibilities.

[2] By 1911, when the Alaska fishing industry reached an annual value of nearly US$17 million,[1] it had become clear that the United States Government needed to make radical changes in how it enforced the provisions of the Alien Fisheries Act, including funding the acquisition of a fleet of dedicated fishery patrol vessels under the BOF.

[1] She had a Scotch marine boiler and an 85-horsepower (63 kW) compound steam engine which gave her an average speed of 8 to 10 knots (15 to 19 km/h; 9.2 to 11.5 mph).

Osprey departed Washington on 8 July 1913 to steam north for her first season as a BOF patrol vessel in Alaskan waters.

[1] The BOF's deputy commissioner, Ernest Lester Jones, spent 60 days aboard her in 1914[1] and – noting that she had only 1 foot (0.3 m) of freeboard amidships, a height of 14 feet (4.3 m) from her main deck to the top of her pilothouse, and most of her machinery above the waterline – reported that she was top-heavy, on one occasion in the autumn of 1914 rolling without warning onto her side in a strong wind, causing her engine room to flood.

[1] He described her as unseaworthy, confined to her dock on many days when her boiler was in need of maintenance, and dangerously unstable, unable to leave port whenever a strong wind was blowing.

[1] In 1915, after two inspectors found Osprey to be in a poor state of repair, the BOF believed that she would be condemned at Ketchikan, Territory of Alaska, but she avoided this fate and remained in service.

After spending the summer of 1916 on her normal salmon enforcement duties in Southeast Alaska, she departed for Seattle, Washington, in October 1916 to undergo repairs there.

In the late spring of 1918 she came to the assistance of the boat Good Tidings, which had broken down during a storm, and towed her 10 nautical miles (19 km; 12 mi) to Ketchikan.

[1] After the Canadian passenger liner SS Princess Sophia ran aground on Vanderbilt Reef in Lynn Canal near Juneau, Territory of Alaska, and sank in a storm on 25 October 1918 with the loss of all 343 people on board[3] – the worst maritime disaster in the combined history of Alaska and British Columbia – Osprey joined the BOF fishery patrol vessels USFS Auklet and USFS Murre in a fruitless search for survivors that lasted into November 1918.

[1] The BOF found her so unseaworthy by that time that it sent her to Cordova, Territory of Alaska, to be laid up, and decided to spend no more money on significant repairs to her.