When John Benson joined the Coast Guard as a seaman 30 years ago, what attracted him most to the nation's smallest sea-service was the prospect of helping to rescue recreational boaters.

Back then, Coast Guard crews routinely came to the aid of stranded pleasure-boaters who had run out of fuel, towing them back to their marinas and making sure they were okay. Benson qualified as a radio operator so he'd be at the center of such rescue efforts. "My job was to send our boats out there to help bring people in," he says.

Today, retired from the Coast Guard and "skipper" of his own 17-foot powerboat, Nautikids, the 48-year-old Benson expects that if he ever runs out of fuel or gets stuck on a shoal, he'll have to radio a commercial towing service rather than a Coast Guard crew to bring him back to port.

While the Coast Guard still rescues recreational boats if life is at risk—indeed, the news clips are filled with such stories every week—it no longer tows pleasure-boats that have run out of fuel or that experience routine mechanical trouble. By law, that's left to commercial towing firms such as Sea Tow or TowBoatU.S. "There's an entire industry out there that didn't exist when I was in the Coast Guard," Benson says.

The change in towing policy may be the most visible shift in the Coast Guard's changing relationship with recreational boaters, but it isn't the only one. As longtime boaters can attest, their contacts with the Coasties, as Coast Guard men and women are popularly known, used to be more frequent—and friendlier—than they seem today.The Coast Guard Auxiliary, a volunteer body, now handles much of the inspection and education work. Shown here are Auxiliary boats on patrol.

Talk to some old salts at your marina and you'll hear stories of how Coasties used to be considered part of the recreational boating family. Coast Guard personnel actively promoted boating safety and did some community outreach. Although the Coasties boarded some pleasure-boats to check for required safety gear, inspections were a lot less formal. And no one carried a weapon or wore a flak vest.

These days, however, boardings are more businesslike, and Coast Guard personnel often are strict and unsmiling. They're also conspicuously armed: boarding crews routinely carry pistols and automatic rifles and wear body armor. And their bright-orange inflatable patrol boats often have an M-240 machine gun mounted on their bows.

Indeed, the Coast Guard's profile among recreational boaters has shrunk dramatically over the past few years. State agencies now conduct most on-the-water inspections and the states and volunteer organizations have taken over boating education, while the Coast Guard has turned more to homeland security and law enforcement. The sea service has become better know for its heroic rescues after Hurricane Katrina and its controversial handling of the oil-tanker spill off San Francisco.

"The Coast Guard used to be viewed as a friend of recreational boaters, but now they've become more of a police force and they're perceived as less friendly," says Jim Welday, 63, a longtime boater on Chesapeake Bay who owns a 19-foot rigid inflatable that he operates on the South River just below Annapolis. "It's just a sign of the times."

CHANGING TIMESCOAST GUARD CUTTER HICKORYThe crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Hickory keeps watch on the stern tow. The Coast Guard still performs rescue missions when life is at stake, but routine calls for fuel or mechanical trouble are now largely handled by private towing companies.

And there's more on the way. Coast Guard Commandant Thad W. Allen served notice last summer that he believes the nation is vulnerable to terrorist attacks by saboteurs using small airplanes and recreational boats, and he'd like to tighten procedures for keeping tabs on pleasure-craft and for identifying those who operate them.

While the Coast Guard has no firm plans yet for issuing small-vessel security regulations, it's clearly exploring its options. This year the service is asking Congress to require recreational boaters to show boarding officers a photo-I.D. card, such as a driver's license. (Under current law, boaters may refuse to do so.)

Unless Congress intervenes, the service also may end up having to write—and enforce—new court-ordered regulations on ballast-water discharges which critics say could cost pleasure-boaters hundreds of dollars. A judge recently ordered the new standards for merchant ships, which routinely take on and expel large qualities of water to stabilize their loads, but did not exempt small boats.

To be sure, the Coast Guard is a long way from abandoning recreational boaters. Its crews still rescue pleasure-craft that are in imminent danger. It is installing a state-of-the-art communications system that can pinpoint vessels in distress. And it is improving safety regulations, such as requirements for wearing life-jackets.

Still, much of the direct contact with recreational boaters that the Coast Guard used to have is now being made by state agencies or private groups. State governments now do the lion's share of rulemaking regarding recreational boats, set boater-education requirements, and enforce most maritime laws applying to pleasure-craft. The Coast Guard provides grants to states to help finance such programs. Last year, they totaled $106 million.

State marine police and the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary—the service's 27,000-member volunteer arm—conduct on-the-water boater assistance patrols, towing stranded boaters back to port (provided they haven't yet called a commercial towing firm). They also teach boating safety, along with organizations like the U.S. Power Squadrons.

The changes in the Coast Guard's relationship with recreational boaters have been evolving slowly. Back in the 1970s, the Coast Guard was known mainly as a search-and-rescue agency. It also did other jobs, from maintaining navigation aids to overseeing marine licensing procedures. But it all added up to helping mariners.

Over the past 30 years, however, the service has seen its workload mushroom as Congress piled on a spate of new missions, from drug interdiction and immigration enforcement to pollution control and, most recently, counterterrorism and port security. At the same time, its budget hasn't always kept pace.

The Coast Guard's budget request for fiscal 2008, which ends next September 30, totals $8.7 billion—an increase of only three percent over the $8.45 billion that Congress authorized for fiscal 2007, and a slowdown from the increases of the past several years, according to the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. About 35 percent of the service's budget each year goes to pay for its homeland security missions.

"The Coast Guard is dreadfully underfunded and woefully overmissioned," says Robert Work, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense-oriented research group in Washington. "National leaders need to decide whether we are going to re-fund the Coast Guard—and then act on it."

TURNING POINTSU.S.COAST GUARD PETTY OFFICER SHAWN EGGERTA Mexican Navy commander fires a .50 caliber machine gun aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Osprey. The guns are new, part of the Guard's homeland security mission.

There have been several major turning-points in the Coast Guard's relationship with recreational boating: federal legislation in 1971 transferred many of the Coast Guard's boating safety functions to the states; lobbying by commercial towing firms, which complained that the Coasties were hurting their livelihood, led to restrictions on Coast Guard towing; and the September 2001 terrorist attacks pushed the Coast Guard into a leading role in homeland security.

The 1971 law, called the Federal Boating Safety Act, expanded the Coast Guard's power to set broad regulations for recreational boating, from requirements for lights and equipment to manufacturing standards for pleasure craft. It also shifted the bulk of the work in boating education and enforcement to state agencies and to major boating service organizations.

By the mid-1980s, the states, along with organizations such as the Coast Guard Auxiliary and the Power Squadrons had taken on most of the "boater-friendly" jobs that the Coast Guard had been doing before.

The shift has been dramatic. Before the 1971 law was put into effect, the Coast Guard had a 500-man force assigned specifically to recreational boating. Special boating-safety detachments patrolled lakes and rivers as well as coastal waters. To recreational boaters, Coast Guard units seemed to be everywhere, ready to help.

"They were on many inland waters then where the Coast Guard no longer has a presence," says Jeff Hoedt, who heads the Coast Guard's office of boating safety in Washington.

Today the Coast Guard has only 30 people assigned to recreational boating, and they're all in administrative jobs ashore. While Coasties still conduct more than 50,000 boardings a year, state marine police perform more than 1.5 million, and the Coast Guard Auxiliary and U.S. Power Squadrons provide "courtesy" safety equipment checks for 120,000 more. Law-enforcement in the recreational boating area is handled primarily by state and county marine police.

Coast Guard statistics show that the changes haven't hurt boating safety. While the number of recreational boats in the United States has soared over the past 35 years—from 5.5 million in 1971 to 12.7 million in 2006, boating-related fatalities have plunged, from 1,582 in 1971 to 710 last year. (The National Marine Manufacturers Association estimates the total number of recreational boats in use at almost 18 million.)

"That's a pretty spectacular track-record," Hoedt says.

HOMELAND SECURITYU.S. COAST GUARD PA2 ALLYSON E. T. CONROYA Coast Guard crewman carries an armload of marijuana bricks from a seizure.

Perhaps the biggest change came after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when the Coast Guard was thrust into a central role in the nation's new homeland security effort and was transferred to the new Department of Homeland Security.

Almost overnight, the service intensified its efforts in tracking and inspecting commercial freighters and passenger vessels, stepping up port security and policing coastal waters and harbors to detect potential saboteurs. Boarding crews were heavily armed. Ultimately, it even adopted a new SWAT-team-style work uniform.

The Coast Guard also began a massive shipbuilding program designed to provide an array of new vessels, from oceangoing warships to faster, more heavily armed patrol-boats capable of pursuing—and challenging—possible threats to U.S. security, both within U.S. waters and offshore.

And, over the past two years, the service has undergone a major reorganization that has integrated many of its missions and resources. The new structure has given more authority to so-called sector commanders in each of 35 major maritime areas to help coordinate Coast Guard activities. And it has gathered its special enforcement units—strike forces, law-enforcement teams and port security units—under a single nationwide command.

The service also is working to set up a nationwide database of registered recreational boats—authorized by Congress almost 20 years ago—that Coast Guard and state officials could use in law-enforcement activities. Some 12 states already have signed up to participate in the program, and more are expected to join once the system goes into effect.

Finally, the Coast Guard is putting into operation an automatic identification system (AIS) for larger vessels that will broadcast a ship's position, course, speed and other information to law-enforcement activities and other vessels—a boon for tracking and locating ships for search-and-rescue efforts and for homeland security purposes.

Coast Guard officials say the AIS program isn't likely to affect small pleasure-craft directly anytime soon, and they haven't yet decided what to do about keeping tabs on recreation boats.

"The Coast Guard is looking at all options, and has decided none," Hoedt says, with emphasis. Nevertheless, it's clear that concerns about potential terrorism involving small boats are on the commandant's mind.

But, as Admiral Allen himself found out, there are limits to how far the service can go. Musing about the homeland security threat in a speech a year ago, Allen threw out the notion that the Coast Guard might require mandatory licensing to help keep tabs on recreational boating.

"What I'm trying to do is to kind of stick my toe in the water and see if I get bit by a piranha," he told a group of state legislators.

The reaction was instantaneous.

Michael G. Sciulla, senior vice president of the Boat Owners Association of the United States (BoatU.S.), called the licensing idea an "ill-conceived" suggestion "that will inconvenience everyone and not result in a substantial increase in security."

Other boating groups piled on, and Allen quickly pulled his toe out of the water. The service now is returning to a three-year-old proposal asking Congress for authority to set federal requirements for mandatory boater education. Only a few states have such programs so far, and many are cursory or apply only to teenagers.

CHANGING IMAGEU.S. COAST GUARDEight crewmembers from a disabled casino boat in Jacksonville, Florida, are rescued by the Coast Guard crews in heavy seas.

The changes come at a time when the Coast Guard is being called on to expand its bigger-picture duties even more. Along with its homeland security tasks, the service is being propelled into a sharply expanded role under a new national maritime strategy proposed earlier this year, under which it will be asked to cooperate more closely with the Navy and Marine Corps to help guard global sea lanes, combat piracy and terrorism, and help provide humanitarian assistance and disaster aid around the world.

The Coast Guard's overall performance since 9/11 has been mixed—and far more high-profile than before. In 2005, the service won plaudits for its rescue efforts during Hurricane Katrina, when it singlehandedly pulled more than 25,000 persons off rooftops and flooded streets in New Orleans—one of the few real success stories in the aftermath of the massive hurricane.

A year later, the Coast Guard found itself embroiled in a major scandal when its massive shipbuilding program, Operation Deepwater, foundered after the service set up a system that allowed the shipbuilders to oversee themselves. An initial effort to convert rusting 110-foot patrol boats into more versatile 123-foot cutters, was canceled after inspectors found hull cracks and engine failures. And the first completed new ship, a $564 million National Security Cutter designed especially for its homeland security mission, was found to have structural weaknesses that some Coast Guard engineers feared might jeopardize its safety and limit its lifespan without costly repairs.

After intense negotiations with the contractors, the fleet-building program has been resumed—but with major delays, an increased projected cost of $24 billion (up from $17 billion) and a major embarrassment to the Coast Guard that has tarnished the image it earned during the post-Katrina rescues.

The blame for last month's incident in San Francisco, where an oil tanker hit the San Francisco Bay Bridge and spewed some 58,000 gallons of oil into local waters and onto beaches, is still in dispute. The Coast Guard says it did everything by the book to head off such a mishap and deal with the resulting oil spills. Some outside groups—and San Francisco city officials—are more critical, arguing it was slow to respond on both counts.

Although none of these incidents is expected to have much impact on the Coast Guard's relationship with recreational boaters, former Coastie John Benson says it's likely that the service won't go back to its friendlier, lower-key days of the 1970s—if only because it has so many security missions on its platter.

"We didn't have to wear all that body armor," he recalls, with a smile.

Art Pine is a veteran journalist who has served as a Washington correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. A longtime Chesapeake Bay sailor, he is a licensed captain and a member of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary.