[2] The United States Bureau of Fisheries (BOF) purchased her at Portland, Oregon, in April 1922 and renamed her USFS Scoter.

[2] The steamer Akutan towed her from Portland to Bristol Bay on the coast of the Territory of Alaska, delivering her to the BOF there on 16 May 1922.

[2] Sixteen years after the United States Congress assigned the BOF the responsibility for enforcing fishery and marine mammal regulations in the Territory of Alaska with the Alien Fisheries Act of 1906,[3] Scoter′s arrival gave the BOF its first real capability to enforce regulations efficiently in the Bristol Bay area.

[2] In her early years, Scoter's annual operational pattern involved patrols in the Bristol Bay region each summer, often followed by autumn patrols in Southeast Alaska, with winters spent hauled out of the water at the BOF station at the Naknek River on the Bristol Bay coast.

[2] In the 1930s, Scoter undertook patrols near Sitka in Southeast Alaska and Neah Bay on the northern coast of Washington to protect fur seal herds.

[2] Over the winter of 1933–1934, Scoter and the BOF fishery patrol vessel USFS Crane supported a Civil Works Administration-funded project to clear and improve salmon spawning streams in Southeast Alaska,[2][4] and by 22 February 1934 the 200 temporary employees involved had cleared log jams and other obstructions from a combined total of 802 miles (1,291 km) of waterways in 325 streams.