mid-July 1945, when she shifted to Pensacola, Florida, for duty involving training and logistical support of the observation aircraft operations there. Absecon carried out this training through the end of World War II on 15 August 1945 and into September 1945. During those nine months, she conducted 1,839 catapult launches, an average of 204 per month, and qualified 274 pilots. Her peak production of pilots occurred in March 1945 when she qualified 45, and her peak number of launches occurred during August 1945, when she conducted 340. Post-World War II As the helicopter began to supplant cruiser- and battleship-based seaplanes, the need for qualifying pilots of floatplanes diminished accordingly. After a period as a training ship based at Pensacola, Absecon was decommissioned on 19 March 1947 and placed in reserve, laid up in the Atlantic Reserve Fleet in Orange, Texas. United States Coast Guard service Barnegat-class ships were very reliable and seaworthy and had good habitability, and the United States Coast Guard viewed them as ideal for ocean station duty, in which they would perform weather reporting and search and rescue tasks, once they were modified by having a balloon shelter added aft and having oceanographic equipment, an oceanographic winch, and a hydrographic winch installed. After World War II, the U.S. Navy transferred 18 of the ships to the Coast Guard, in which they were known as the Casco-class cutters. The U.S. Navy loaned Absecon to the Coast Guard on 4 January 1949. After she underwent conversion for service as a weather reporting ship, the Coast Guard commissioned her as USCGC Absecon (WAVP-374) in May 1949. Service history Absecon was stationed at Norfolk, Virginia, throughout her Coast Guard career. Her primary duty was to serve on ocean stations in the Atlantic Ocean to gather meteorological data. While on duty in one of these stations, she was required to patrol a 210-square-mile (544-square-kilometer) area for three weeks at a time, leaving the area only when physically relieved by another Coast Guard cutter or in the case of a dire emergency. While on station, she acted as an aircraft check point at the point of no return, a relay point for messages from ships and aircraft, as a source of the latest weather information for passing aircraft, as a floating oceanographic laboratory, and as a search-and-rescue ship for downed aircraft and vessels in distress, and engaged in law enforcement operations. During the