USCGC Maple (WLB-207) is a Juniper-class seagoing buoy tender operated by the United States Coast Guard.
[7] This capability has allowed Maple to service NOAA's 6-meter NOMAD weather buoys, which weigh 25,000 pounds.
[16] In 2013 she partnered with USGS to deploy ocean-bottom seismometers to study earthquake behavior in Southeast Alaska.
[18] In September 2004 Maple was dispatched as part of a large, unsuccessful effort to find an aircraft that was lost with five people aboard.
A light oil sheen was found on Peril Strait and it was hoped that Maple's side-scan sonar might locate the wreck on the sea bottom.
Maple intercepted the craft, which was 200 feet (61 m) long, and found that it was abandoned and empty, with no identifying marks as to its origin.
She sailed for a mid-life overhaul at the Coast Guard Yard in Curtis Bay, Maryland via the Northwest Passage across the top of Alaska and Canada.
[24] After Maple reached the Coast Guard Yard, her crew was transferred to USCGC Kukui, which had just completed her mid-life overhaul.
They sailed their new vessel back from Baltimore to Sitka via the Panama Canal, completing a circumnavigation of North America, in July 2018.
[25] Maple was the fourth Juniper-class cutter to receive her mid-life overhaul under of the Coast Guard's In-Service Vessel Sustainment program.
Her primary mission is maintaining over 200 aids to navigation along the Atlantic Coast from Shark River, New Jersey to the North Carolina-South Carolina border.
[27] In 2019 Maple assisted NASA in testing the Crew Module Uprighting System of the Orion spacecraft, which is planned to land on water.