The Keeper class of coastal buoy tenders consists of fourteen ships built for and operated by the United States Coast Guard.

Their secondary missions include marine environmental protection, search and rescue, law enforcement, and light ice-breaking.

[1] The obsolescence of the coastal buoy tender fleet came as no surprise, since some had been built during World War II, but it took several years for the Coast Guard, its parent agency at the time, the Department of Transportation, Congress, and private shipyards to deliver a solution.

The coastal buoy tender replacement project originated in the Operations Directorate of Coast Guard Headquarters.

[2] At this point, existing Federal Government regulations, notably Office of Management and Budget Circular A-109 dealing with major systems acquisition, specified much of the contracting process.

On 1 June 1993 the Commandant of the Coast Guard issued a document titled "WLM(R) Circular of Requirements", specifying major aspects of the ships' design.

[8] The contract was a firm order for detailed design and the production of the lead vessel in the class, USCGC Ida Lewis, at a fixed cost of $22 million plus various performance incentives, with options for thirteen more ships, spare parts, and training.

[13] At the time of the contract award, the Coast Guard announced its intentions to replace the eleven White-class and Red-class cutters still in service with the fourteen keeper-class ships.

This saved maintenance expenses on the aging ships, and also significantly reduced personnel requirements through the introduction of advanced technology.

The Coast Guard placed a 60-person Project Resident Office on site at Marinette's shipyard to monitor and facilitate these two concurrent construction programs.

[18] The ships have two Caterpillar 3508 DITA (direct-injection, turbocharged, aftercooled) 8-cylinder diesel engines which produce 1,000 horsepower (750 kW) each.

[11] Their tanks can hold 16,385 US gallons (62,020 L; 13,643 imp gal) of diesel fuel[21] which gives them an unrefueled range of 2,000 nautical miles (3,700 km; 2,300 mi) at 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph).

When Ida Lewis, the lead ship of the class was commissioned in 1997, she had a crew of 18, commanded by a Chief Warrant Officer.

[25] Keeper-class hulls have a strengthened "ice belt" along the waterline so that they can work on aids to navigation in ice-infested waters.

In order to reach that goal, the Coast Guard has awarded class-wide contracts for a number of major maintenance items: All of the ships were launched into the Menominee River in Marinette, Wisconsin.

When the Coast Guard accepted the ships, and ownership passed from Marinette Marine, they were placed "in commission, special" status.

For example, Henry Blake, which had one of the longer trips from Marinette, made port calls in four countries and eleven states.