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.