New London — Capt. Joseph Meuse has taken over as commanding officer of the Coast Guard Leadership Development Center from Capt. Aaron "Muddy" Waters, who is retiring from the service after a 31-year career that included piloting one of the first helicopters to respond to Hurricane Katrina.

The Coast Guard said the LDC serves more than 8,000 students — officers, enlisted, civilian employees and auxiliary — each year through 22 courses. The center produces more than half of the Coast Guard's officer corps, and in addition to the Coast Guard Academy, has detachments in Yorktown, Va., and Petaluma, Calif.

A change of command ceremony took place Friday morning in the Leamy Hall auditorium. Waters thanked his family for "making the trip in a hurricane. Or, the remnants of a hurricane. I've seen bigger."

He recalled in an interview that while the first search and rescue mission is always special, his "wasn't that harrowing rescue" one thinks of. A vessel capsized, but its occupants were wearing life jackets, and when the Coast Guard found them the next morning, "it was 82 degrees, winds were 5 miles an hour, and the sun was out." But Waters also recalled landing a helicopter in a cow pasture in Haiti in the middle of a hurricane to rescue a serviceman who was ill.

He said he decided to retire now because he has two kids at Waterford High School and didn't want to move them, and he will take some time off and "enjoy the New England summer."

Waters, 48, graduated from the Coast Guard Academy in 1994 and worked in drug and migrant interdiction before going to flight school. The Coast Guard said Waters led aircrews making rescues along the Mississippi Coast hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, and continued flying rescue missions along the Gulf Coast for the next several weeks.

Assigned to Air Station New Orleans in 2012, he was second in command of the service's busiest search and rescue helicopter unit.

Waters returned to the Coast Guard Academy in 2015 as the cadet training officer; served as chief of business operations at Force Readiness Command in Norfolk, Va.; and then returned to the academy again in May 2019 to serve as commanding officer of the LDC.

Waters has coached baseball, hockey, football and competitive shooting, and during the ceremony, Rear Adm. Joanna Nunan, deputy for personnel readiness at Coast Guard headquarters, drew parallels between coaching and leadership.

"I like what I see," she said of the LDC. "I'm very impressed with the work you're doing, and the technological innovation I've seen during the (coronavirus) pandemic."

Nowadays, she said, the courses taught through the LDC must deliver equity and inclusion, and address bullying, hazing and sexual assault. She later added that if the Coast Guard is going to demand a good-faith effort from people in search and rescue and law enforcement, it must provide an environment that is respectful and rewarding.

Both Waters and Meuse said that serving as commanding officer of the LDC had been their dream job.

"One of the great opportunities is getting to relieve a living legend, a living hero, in Captain Waters," Meuse said, "so my first goal is to really understand how the Leadership Development Center runs, know all the people who work here, and really try to continue a lot of the great work that Captain Waters started. This last year has been extraordinarily challenging with COVID."

Meuse, 45, comes to the LDC from Marine Corps War College Quantico, where he earned a master's in strategic studies. He has served as Coast Guard Academy company officer, International Training Division operations officer and Training Center Cape May executive officer.

A 1998 graduate of the academy, Meuse has spent his career in the Coast Guard's Deployable Specialized Forces.

He previously led a law enforcement detachment on counter-drug missions in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific; supported Operation Enduring Freedom, targeting Al-Qaeda leadership in the Arabian Gulf; and led a unit providing security at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

e.moser@theday.com