VINALHAVEN – The Coast Guard electrician raised his black sunglasses to peer intently into the lighthouse’s broken fog detector, readying his tools to fix the problem while standing on a narrow catwalk three stories above the rocky island.

Nathan Sammons, electrician’s mate third class from Orange, Calif., had clambered with his toolbox up the spiral wooden stairway and iron ladder rungs of Heron Neck Light, an elegant white structure straight from the mid-1800s that perches on the southern tip of Greens Island like a snowy egret overlooking the sun-speckled dark green sea.

Worlds – and centuries – collide each time the U.S. Coast Guard Aids to Navigation Team from Southwest Harbor does repair and maintenance work on one of the 23 active lighthouses and three light towers found in their coverage area. Most of the structures were built more than 100 years ago.

And despite the proliferation of cutting-edge navigational tools such as Global Positioning Systems that have reduced the need for the old-fashioned help of a flashing light or a sounding foghorn, the lighthouses are here to stay, the men said.

“I don’t think they’ll ever go away,” Scott Sheriff, electrician’s mate first class from Coast Guard Station Southwest Harbor, said. “They shouldn’t. I think they’re awesome. Even if they only save one person’s life in five years, that’s still one person. That’s why I think our job is very critical.”

Maine’s lighthouses still are used by boats both big and small, including fishing vessels and giant cruise ships. And every time Coast Guard officials suggest decommissioning one and switching off the light, they are met with vociferous protests – and not just from the legions of lighthouse lovers from all over the country.

“We hear it from everybody, that there’s no way we should do that,” Cmdr. Robert Burchell of Coast Guard Station Southwest Harbor said. “We hear from the fisherman, from the mariner, that they rely on lighthouses for navigational purposes. It gives them that comfort feeling.”

Electrical systems can fail, he said, rendering GPS and other devices worthless.

“You need to be able to fall back on the traditional methods of navigation, lighthouses, buoys, channel markers and just knowing where you’re at,” the commander said. “We run into it on a regular basis, where a mariner just relies on an electronic package and the next thing they know, they’re on the rocks.”

The automated lighthouses are fitted with computers that can send distress signals to the Coast Guard shop in Southwest Harbor if a piece of machinery has failed. Failures can occur in all sorts of state-of-the-art bells and whistles, such as 300-millimeter optic lenses and fog detectors that use light strobes to detect how thick the fog is and tell the foghorn when it should sound.

Lighthouse technology clearly has advanced beyond the “fog dog” days of the early 20th century, when a keeper taught his dog, Nemo, to bark loudly when he heard foghorns from approaching boats. Nevertheless, some of the crew members said that the progress may not be enough to keep them relevant.

“I don’t want to say it’s a dying technology,” Sammons said. “They are used. But the technology’s moving faster than the lighthouses.”

The 22 team members are out at least once a week throughout the year in all kinds of weather, using boats or helicopters to reach the lighthouses and buoys. The crew does a good job, according to the commander, and has had no operational accidents in at least three years.

“It’s one of the best-run Aids to Navigation Teams in the country,” Burchell said. “That’s very significant when they have buoys and lighthouses and helicopters … that’s some of the most dangerous work.”

A recent day’s mission entailed work on two lighthouses – routine maintenance at Egg Rock Light, which sits on a desolate dot of land at the entrance to Frenchman Bay, and routine and repair work at the lighthouse at Heron Neck, where the fog detector was malfunctioning.

“We’re trying to correct the problem,” Sammons said. “So Mr. Chummer guy can get his lobsters and hear the foghorn and say, ‘Oh, the lighthouse is right there.'”

The trip to Greens Island from the airport in Trenton in the orange and black Coast Guard helicopter was cold, noisy and speedy. Dozens of islands were scattered far below like green jigsaw pieces decorated with tiny spruce forests and the steeples and meadows of miniature, picture-perfect New England villages.

The three team members wore heavy, insulated flight suits and earplugs to cut back on the roar of the beating rotors. Communication with the helicopter crew, which had flown in from Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod, Mass., early that morning, was reduced to hand gestures and grins.

The belly of the helicopter – or “helo” in Coast Guard parlance – was full of the waterproof bags and boxes of equipment needed for repair work or for the odd time when another emergency would leave the crew stranded overnight on one of the far-away islands.

“Anything can happen,” Sheriff said. “You don’t know what you’re going to run into, and you’re so far out there. The object is, whatever you need, make sure you have it.”

In addition to the inherent, complex challenges of maintaining the lighthouses and 268 floating navigational buoys that dot Maine’s coast from Marshall Point Lighthouse in Port Clyde all the way to the Canadian border, the crews face perils that range from the deadly to the bizarre.

Winter weather and ice, especially on the slippery buoy platforms, pose dangers to the crews. But those who maintain the remote lighthouses, which often are located in prime breeding grounds for seabirds such as puffins, terns and cormorants, grapple with more unusual hazards.

“In some of the lighthouses, the birds can get pretty aggressive, especially during mating season,” said Chris Boss, first class petty officer with the Aids to Navigation Team. “It’s one of the things we get to see. Not a lot of people get dive-bombed by birds … it’s kind of funny.”

Only eggshells and feathers remained of the seabirds on the sunny, cold November day, and the unoccupied keeper’s house next door to the lighthouse looked serene and inviting.

“This place is really nice during the summer,” Sammons said. “Perfect, kind of perfect. You’d kind of like to live here.”

After a whirlwind, thorough inspection of the maintenance check list and a final tweaking of the now-working fog detector, the men packed up their gear as the helicopter pounded in over the ocean.

“We look at it this way,” Sammons said. “Lighthouses are always a good landmark if [mariners] don’t know where they’re at. On top of that, there’s a lot of heritage.”