SSN-706
USS Albuquerque
Silentum Excubitor  ·  Silent Guardian

Thank you, shipmates.

This has been a hell of a weekend. What started Friday with a handful of corrections from the Facebook group turned into a full-scale research pass across Wikipedia, uscarriers.net, navysite.de, hullnumber.com, seaforces.org, Navy.mil / DVIDS, and the 80-minute Albuquerque Historical Society presentation by Terry Owen at the Albuquerque Museum.

The result: the site you're landing on now is dramatically more complete than it was 72 hours ago. Every port call, every exercise name, every commanding officer tenure, every photograph — rebuilt from the ground up against public-record sources, with your first-hand contributions weaving through all of it.

Here's who helped, what landed, and what's still on the boards.

Shipmate contributions that started this

Jason Donham
Added Cartagena, Spain to the 1999 Noble Anvil deployment port list. Your "fun with anchors" note is going to become a story on this site someday.
David S. Mortimer
Your link to the official 2017 decommissioning program PDF cracked this whole project open. From that single document we confirmed all 14 COs, built the full decommissioning page, corrected the motto to Silent Guardian, captured the Rio Grande Rolls Royce tradition, and tracked down the battle flag and crest symbology.
Francis T. Hopkins Jr.
Added Port Everglades (1985 Submarine Command Course) and Rosyth, Scotland (1995) — both now on the history page, world map, and port list with photos on the gallery.
Steve Blakeman
Confirmed Southern Drug Operations 2007 (SOUTHCOM) — now a full row in the deployment record. You kept "Sure Shooter" anchored on the Noble Anvil page where it belongs. And you surfaced Animal Boat — now documented on the history page alongside Sure Shooter, Shooter of the Fleet, and Silent Guardian.
Jerry Birthelmer
Full 2015 final deployment port list: Garden Island (HMAS Stirling, Australia) · Duqm, Oman · Diego Garcia (BIOT). All three on the world map with 2015 photographs on the gallery.
Dennis MacDougall
Flagged that Medal M awards may be missing from the honors record. Still working the clarifying question below — help us nail down which award specifically.

Round 3: Everything added this weekend

Beyond the individual corrections, here's the scope of the weekend rebuild:

New nickname: "Shooter of the Fleet" Added after CDR Donald Tenney's on-camera KUSI News San Diego quote: "She's also known as the Shooter of the Fleet because she has a history of being the highest percentage of successful Tomahawk shots during the Coastal Conflict." Site now documents four names she carried: Sure Shooter · Shooter of the Fleet · Animal Boat · Silent Guardian.
Deployment log expanded to 31 rows Added: 1987 Saratoga BG, 1988 Shellback Initiation, 1992-93 JFK BG with full Mediterranean port list (Naples, Athens, Thessaloniki, Gibraltar, Halifax), Marcot exercises '93/'95/'98, 1996 West Atlantic 83 consecutive days submerged, Aug 2000 Willemstad Curaçao counter-narcotics, 2004 Exercise MAJESTIC EAGLE (three carriers: Truman, Enterprise, French Charles de Gaulle), 2005 Rota Spain, 2005 American Chopper visit, 2006 Iwo Jima ESG, 2007 Trinidad & Tobago JIATF-South, 2011 Brisbane + Apra Harbor Guam alongside USS Frank Cable (AS-40), 2015 Exercise LUNGFISH with HMAS Rankin, complete 3-row inactivation/transit/decom ceremony sequence.
Photo gallery rebuilt from scratch 20+ photographs across six eras: Birth of a Warship (1982-83 launching + commissioning + inclining trials) · Cold War (1989 Port Everglades) · Post-Cold War (1992 Mediterranean, Noble Anvil context) · GWOT Era (2003 post-ERO, 2004 Majestic Eagle exercise, 2005 Orange County Choppers visit, 2005 Souda Bay, 2006 Persian Gulf, 2009 Souda Bay) · Pacific Years (2011 Yokosuka/Guam/Frank Cable, 2013 WESTPAC, 2013 San Diego homecoming) · Final Deployment (2015 pre-deployment, Diego Garcia, Change of Command) · Inactivation & Decom (Oct 16 2015 Point Loma, Oct 21 departure, Feb 27 2017 Keyport w/ MC1 Amanda R. Gray credit). Each photo has a full caption and proper source attribution. Lightbox viewer with keyboard navigation.
New page: City of Albuquerque Full dedicated section on the namesake city — covering the 1706 Spanish founding, the hull number tribute, Sandia Labs, Kirtland AFB, and the Rolls Royce tradition. Embedded 80-minute Terry Owen presentation from the Albuquerque Historical Society's Feb 2026 event. Featured section on the Tingley Beach Memorial — the sail is in Albuquerque being prepared as a permanent monument. The City has committed ~$800K; roughly $5M is still being raised. Sen/RADM (ret.) Bill Payne's NM Senate Memorial 12 (2015) formally recognized the boat's service.
New page: Fleet Comparison Every LA-class (62 boats), Seawolf-class (3), Virginia-class (24+), and Ohio-class boomer (18 SSBN/SSGN) in sectioned tables. Our row highlighted in gold with a "THIS SITE" badge. Tribute Site column ready to link to other crews' memorial sites as they come in. If your boat is missing or you know of a sister crew's tribute site, please reach out — we want every boat on this table to eventually link to something that honors her.
World map expanded New countries highlighted: Norway, Spain, Oman, Australia, Canada. 11+ new port markers including Holy Loch, Portsmouth (England), Thessaloniki, Gibraltar, Halifax, Tromsø, Willemstad (Curaçao), Rota, Trinidad & Tobago, Apra Harbor/Polaris Point Guam, and Andros Island/AUTEC Bahamas. Rio Grande Valley marker added for the namesake city and planned Tingley Beach memorial.
All 14 commanding officers confirmed Stayed from the round 2 fix: every CO with exact tenure dates from the official 2017 decommissioning program. Expanded operational context for each (Burroughs hosted George H. Bush; Munsch commanded through the record 22.3-month Portsmouth ERO; Douglass bridged Iwo Jima ESG and Southern Drug Ops; Badorf led the Groton→San Diego homeport shift). Full CO list also lives on the Decommissioning page.
Notable visitors documented HRH Crown Prince of Belgium (1985 dinner), SECNAV Richard Cheney (1989), President George H. Bush (1999), Sandy Berger / National Security Advisor (1999), ADM Frank Bowman / Director of Naval Reactors (1999), Paul Teutul Sr. and the Orange County Choppers cast (2005 American Chopper episode).
Terry Owen video embedded The 80-minute presentation retired reactor operator Terry Owen gave at the Albuquerque Museum in February 2026 — with KUSI News San Diego decommissioning segment embedded — now lives on the City of Albuquerque page. Primary source for the memorial funding status and "Shooter of the Fleet" quote.
New page: Submarine Dolphins tribute The insignia we all earned — on its own page. Origin story (CDR Ernest J. King's 1923 proposal, the Bailey Banks & Biddle / William C. Eddy design collaboration, Acting SecNav Theodore Roosevelt Jr.'s 20 March 1924 signature), symbolism (Poseidon, Delphinus, the sailor's friend), the 1924 design specification read out line by line, and the qualification process — qual card, walkthroughs, the dink list, the board, the CO's pin, re-qualifying every boat. Rickover quotes. Related insignias: Combat Patrol (1943), SSBN Deterrent Patrol ("Boomer Pin"), Holland Club at 50 years, USSVI. The gold and silver pin images come straight from Jamie's original ssn706.com/dolphins.htm page — credited and honored.
Meet Albert — the ship's historian chatbot Every page now has a floating ⚓ button in the bottom-right corner. Click it, meet Albert — a Northwest.net AI historian trained on all 19 pages of this site (130,000+ characters of operational history). Ask him about deployments, COs, port calls, nicknames, the dolphins, the Tingley Beach memorial — he'll answer and cite the sources. He won't make up classified details or speculate on things not in the public record. He's Northwest.net's flagship Cascade-tier chatbot product running in its first real-world showcase. Try to stump him.
World map: photo markers Ports on the world map now show a 📷 badge when there's a gallery photo of the boat at that port. Hover the marker — a thumbnail preview pops up. Click it — you jump straight to that era on the gallery page. Naples, Souda Bay, Port Everglades, Manama, Yokosuka, Apra Harbor, and Diego Garcia all have markers-to-gallery links now. More to come as new photos are identified.
Site chrome Favicon (SSN-706 crest) now displays in every browser tab. Navigation unified across all pages: History · Decom · Honors · Dolphins · Command · World Map · Gallery · City · Fleet · Crew Portal. Copyright updated to 2026 site-wide. Three Wikipedia-hotlinked images on the Los Angeles-class page replaced with locally-hosted copies (no more broken images when Wikimedia rate-limits). Search engine index pings sent to Bing + Yandex via IndexNow; Google handled via Search Console on Monday.
Classified material: excluded Strict rule throughout this round: if a deployment detail isn't in the public record (official Navy sources, established fan sites, or crew-confirmed post-declassification), it's not on the site. Boat-specific reactor performance data, torpedo loadouts, sail dimensions beyond what the 2017 decom program published — none of that went up. Shipmate memories of public events: welcome. Classified ops: they stay with those who carried them.
No other submarine crew has a tribute site like this one.
USS Albuquerque was a silent standout —
because her crew was.
Shipmate Input Requested

Should we build a proper Crew Portal?

Right now the "Crew Portal" page on the site is a placeholder. If there's appetite from the crew, I'd like to build a real one — shipmate directory, photo contributions, private discussions, optional @ssn706.com email addresses for verified crew, possibly a Discord server. Before I invest the dev time, I want to hear from you: would you use it? What would make it valuable versus just another login you forget?

Would you use a crew portal if it existed?
Do you want an @ssn706.com email address?
Would a private Discord server for the Albuquerque crew be worth it, or is Facebook enough?
What features would actually get you to log in — photo uploads, deployment-specific discussion threads, directory for reunion planning, something else?
Any concerns we should think about — privacy, ex-crew access, age-out policies, OPSEC on boat-era content?

Drop your answers in the Facebook thread. No wrong answers. Honest "I wouldn't use it" feedback is as useful as "here's what I'd want" feedback — either way, it shapes what gets built vs. what doesn't.

Still open — help us pin these down

A few items the public record won't confirm. If you have firsthand memory, drop it in the Facebook group.

Dennis — what kind of "Medal M"? Navy Expeditionary Medal? Something else? Knowing roughly which year or op would help us chase the citation. The decom program confirms 3 NUC / 4 MUC / 4 Battle E / 1 Combat Action Ribbon — but if there are expeditionary decorations outside those, we want to add them.
Francis — Port Canaveral: which year? Not in the program. If you remember the rough timeframe (East Coast era, 1985–1991?), we'll track it down with a citation.
David (Mortimer) — Portsmouth 1989 · Gibraltar 1991 · St. Croix 1988 · Ft. Lauderdale 88/89/91 All plausible, all consistent with the deployment timeline — but not in the decom program. Any fellow shipmates who can corroborate, please jump in so we can add them to the port record with confidence.
Everyone — the "Animal Boat" origin story Confirmed as one of her earliest nicknames, from the 1980s era. The story behind it lives in crew memory, not in any indexed source we can find. If you served in those early years and know how she got the name — we want to hear it. That's the kind of crew-lore the site should preserve.
1987 Saratoga deployment Public sources confirm the deployment dates (Jun 5 – Oct 22, 1987) and the carrier affiliation but the port call list is thin. Any shipmates on that cruise — we'd love the full port record.
2014 — workup details Between the 2013 WESTPAC deployment and the 2015 final deployment, the 2014 record is thin. Workup period? Transit? Any shipmate memory helps.

Why this matters

The rest of the submarine force mostly disappears into institutional memory when the boat goes to the breakers. The Navy writes a command history, the Navy League runs a ceremony, and the crew scatters.

Albuquerque's different. You've kept the crew together on Facebook for years, and that group has been the single best source of context for this site — better than Wikipedia, better than navy.mil, better than any of the veteran databases we checked. The 2017 decommissioning program helped lock down the official record. You're providing everything else.

Every port added, every nickname remembered, every correction to the historical record makes this the best submarine tribute site on the internet — because no other crew maintains it like you do. And what's on the site now is just round three. There's a lot more to build.

Keep sending corrections. Keep sending memories. Answer the crew portal survey above. This site gets better every time one of you speaks up.

With deep respect and appreciation for the USS Albuquerque crew family —

past, present, and the ones keeping her memory alive.

Silent Service  ·  Deep Running  ·  Never Forgotten