She is outfitted with advanced technological and navigational capabilities that allow her to be positioned correctly for exact placement of buoys through the use of controllable-pitch propellers and stern and bow thrusters.

The current Cypress is much larger at 225 ft (69 m) and 2000 tons, and was the first cutter to implement technological advances such as electronic charting, position keeping, and remote engineering monitoring and control.

Cypress' main area of operation stretches along 900 mi (1,400 km) of the Gulf Coast, from Apalachicola, Florida to the Mexican border at Brownsville, Texas, where she is responsible for the maintenance of 120 floating aids-to-navigation.

[citation needed] In 2005, Cypress contributed to the re-build and extension of the Houston Ship Channel entrance, the portal to the busy Houston-Galveston area and used by more than 6,000 large vessels annually.

In addition to routine and emergency servicing of approximately 120 federal aids-to- navigation, Cypress also assists the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) by servicing approximately twenty weather buoys throughout the Gulf of Mexico, critical to assisting professional mariners with voyage planning as well as tracking and predicting hurricanes.