Like a toppled, miniature lighthouse, the 13,000-pound, red and white candy-striped buoy lies on the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Juniper’s deck.

The steel structure is a constant reminder of the day’s task for the crew of the Juniper, one of the U.S. Coast Guard’s 16 seagoing buoy tenders and one of three with a homeport at the naval station in Newport.

On this Friday, there’s more to the job than simply replacing the buoy, a moored navigational aid for mariners.

The Juniper crew will switch a six-year-old buoy containing a rotation of incandescent light bulbs with a more energy efficient, self-contained light emitting diode (LED) model.

Lt. Cmdr. Rick Wester, commanding officer of the Juniper, said the U.S. Coast Guard had just approved the use of the 6-mile range LED lantern. The cutter is the first to position this kind of lighted buoy — an appropriate task for a ship with the motto “Leading the Way.”

Juniper sets out from State Pier in New London at about 8 on Friday morning. Reveille was two hours earlier for the eight officers and 42 crewmembers on board.

The buoy tender backs off the pier and south into the Fishers Island Sound under a slightly overcast sky. The clipper will travel 8 miles to the buoy off Fishers Island, then 32 miles before being placed on “special sea detail,” meaning it will be within 1 mile of shore as it navigates into Newport.

With Fishers Island in sight, Juniper’s bridge crewmembers sound five short danger signals to a fishing boat headed into the 2,000-ton cutter’s path. The boat fails to change course, violating navigational rules and prompting the cutter to make a 180-degree turn to avoid a potential collision.

Detour aside, the ship reaches its first destination off the northwest side of the island within an hour. The buoy location is pinpointed using a satellite receiver.

The new, 21.4-foot-long buoy’s red and white markings designate a safe water area, typically the entrance to a harbor, while the lettering, SE, stands for Silver Eel Pond.

The Coast Guard has overseen the country’s aids to navigation system since taking over for the U.S. Lighthouse Service in 1939.

In recent years, the Coast Guard has turned to LED technology. Wester said LEDs require less maintenance and power — two solar panels, compared to three on the old model — and are considered more reliable.

Buoys are not the sole business of the Juniper, so Wester said switching out the incandescent lights with LEDs allows the clipper crew to shift from a two- to three-year maintenance cycle.

This saves time for the Juniper crew, responsible for 230 buoys, 180 of which contain lights, in the seas between Cape Cod and New York. At most, the crew has replaced eight buoys in one day, said Wester, a 1993 Coast Guard Academy graduate. The New Hampshire native previously served two years on the buoy tender Walnut, one of the ships sent to Iraq following the invasion in the spring of 2003.

Having replaced about 75 percent of its 4-mile range buoys with LEDs, the crew is now able to devote 40 to 50 percent of its hours to buoy tender work, compared with a previous 70 percent of its hours, he said.

“The challenge of juggling the (buoy) mission and maintaining what they call multi-mission readiness — it’s a fun challenge,” Wester said. “Buoy tendering, we do enough buoys where we’re at a pretty high state of readiness for that.”

The Juniper also serves as an oil skimmer and an icebreaker and conducts search and rescue, law enforcement and homeland security operations.

Commissioned in 1996, the cutter was designed to replace the second Juniper, a 180-foot buoy tender that dated to World War II. The first Juniper was commissioned in 1903.

In the past 12 years, Juniper has responded to the TWA Flight 800 and Egypt Air 990 crashes and was the first major Coast Guard cutter to arrive in New York City following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Wester said the ship is stationed biannually in New York City for two weeks as the evacuation vessel for the United Nations General Assembly.

In October, the crew traveled to Florida for about 40 days of interdiction control. The Juniper served as a holding platform for 86 Cuban migrants awaiting word from the U.S. State Department.

“The Coast Guard is multi-mission. This ship really, truly is multi-mission,” Wester said.

Off Fisher Island, Chief Keith Frost watches over the deck crew as they use boat hooks to pull the buoy toward the clipper’s port side. A base line is looped around the top of the buoy to steady it and a crane on deck hooks and lifts the steel structure onto the deck. The 125-foot chain connecting the buoy to the sinker, or 5,000-pound concrete block, is locked into a saddle on deck.

The buoy’s rusted hull carries about two years of sea growth — algae, seaweed, clams and mussels — and a strong, fishy odor, known to fester on hot, sunny days.

The men go to work scraping off the buildup. It’s a messy job for the deck crewmembers, who wear navy blue coveralls and either white, blue or green helmets, designating them as supervisors, qualified riggers or unqualified riggers, respectively.

Seaman Terry Daignault, of Palos, Ill., has been on board for four months as an unqualified rigger and said its “pretty dirty work” that requires strong communication for safety.

“You really don’t know what you’re going to scrape off,” he said. He said they must climb inside even larger buoys to clean, a nasty task called “shooting the tube.”

The crew inspects the chain — two to three times the depth of the water — and finds a segment too worn. The crane then pulls the sinker on board and the men replace the bottom 35 feet of chain with a new, 45-foot section using a blowtorch and mallets — a process known as “heat and beat.”

About an hour later, the crane lowers the new buoy into the water with an ample splash. The buoy’s whistle emits a deep, groaning sound.

Wester said the buoy that was removed would be delivered to a depot in South Weymouth, Mass. to be sandblasted and painted for reuse.

The Juniper remains steady during the roughly hour-long buoy replacement by utilizing a dynamic positioning system, although, on this day, the seas are calm and winds gentle.

After the task is completed, the cutter heads east through the Race, an expanse known for strong currents that can reach 3 knots, then into the Block Island Sound and north through Narragansett Bay.

The crew gets to work hosing off the deck and completing repairs and cleaning throughout the clipper. In the bridge, the officers communicate by radio with nearby fishing boats, ferries, car carriers and other Coast Guard vessels.

Wester said jobs on buoy tenders are desired because they provide experience including inspecting and enforcing fisheries regulations, icebreaking and oil spill cleanups. U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduates comprise half the crew, while the others are prior enlisted personnel.

Ensign Katie Gareau, one the women who make up 20 percent of the crew, said she graduated from the academy in 2007 and her top job choices were aboard buoy tenders.

Tasked with driving the ship while Chief Frost oversaw the buoy replacement, Gareau, of Cleveland, said she was especially interested in the cutter’s Spilled Oil Recovery System (SORS) equipment.

“My dream job would be on a Strike team,” said the environmental science major of the force charged with responding to that oil, chemical and pollution spills.

Roughly six hours after pushing off from New London, the cutter approaches the Newport Naval Base.

The crewmembers — who come from as far as Maine and New Jersey — change into civilian clothes and leave for a weekend off. They’ll be back Monday to report for gunnery exercises off Martha’s Vineyard, followed by buoy work off New York City.

Wester said the work is rewarding: “When you work a buoy you definitely see the results. You get a better sense of accomplishment seeing the results of your work every day.”

The buoy — looking cleaner, but still discolored and worn from its time at sea — remains on deck, a clear confirmation of that day’s work.

edupuis@thewesterlysun.com