July 30, 2025 —
The Coast Guard on July 15, 2025, began a major maintenance availability (MMA) for the first of 14 175-foot Keeper-class coastal buoy tenders, Coast Guard Cutter Ida Lewis. The MMAs will ensure the coastal buoy tenders remain operationally reliable and effective through their 30-year planned service lives.
MMAs are scheduled, comprehensive overhauls that address both routine and specialized maintenance needs, from hull repair to machinery replacement. They are carefully planned years in advance and are an essential part of the Coast Guard’s strategy to sustain full mission capability through the end of the asset’s planned service life. The coastal buoy tender MMAs will be conducted at Coast Guard Yard in Baltimore and managed through the Coast Guard’s In-Service Vessel Sustainment Program, or ISVS.
“The ISVS Program and Coast Guard Yard have consistently delivered on-time, cost-effective maintenance and service life extension work across a diverse set of Coast Guard vessels,” said Ken King, the ISVS program manager. “Their extensive experience and previous successes with similar efforts will ensure our 175-foot coastal buoy tenders remain ready to support our operational commitments in U.S. waterways.”
The buoy handling crane and gyrocompass, propulsion, hydraulic, firefighting, maneuverability, control and other systems will receive maintenance necessary to sustain high levels of operational readiness, improve supportability and mitigate potential breakdowns. Each coastal buoy tender MMA period will require 12 to 15 months to complete. Ida Lewis, homeported in Newport, Rhode Island, is scheduled to complete its MMA in fall 2026. The estimated project completion date for all 14 cutters in the Coast Guard fleet is early 2040.
Coastal buoy tenders are homeported across the East, West and Gulf Coasts and in Alaska, and designed to conduct near-shore aids to navigation missions that ensure the safe and efficient flow of commercial and recreational ship traffic through U.S. waterways. In addition to their primary mission of setting and maintaining aids to navigation, coastal buoy tenders also conduct law enforcement, disaster response, search and rescue and light ice-breaking missions.
For more information: In-Service Vessel Sustainment Program page