This paper considers the control system design problem of a barge type surface vessel. The main role of a barge ship is to carry and supply cargo and materials to floating units and other marine locations. To carry out this job, the barge ship has to be positioned in a specified area. Although thrust systems are installed on the ship, in general, the mooring winch system with cable is used. Therefore, this paper proposes a single type mooring winch system and a method of designing a control system. We propose a mathematical model of the vessel winch control system, and the reliability of the control system is verified by numerical calculations and experiments. In addition, a cable model is constructed from the experimental data to identify the characteristic of cable motion, which is unknown in general and considered as an uncertainty. Based on these results, a robust control system is designed, and its control performance evaluated by simulation and experiment show that the proposed approach works well.