08/20/2026
There is a submarine sitting in a ditch off Route 1 in Portsmouth, and every submarine in the world today owes it something. 🔱
The USS Albacore was built at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and launched in 1953. She carried no torpedoes and never fought anything. Her entire job was to answer one question: what shape should a submarine actually be? Every boat before her was essentially a surface ship that could duck under water for a while. Albacore was designed from scratch to live down there.
What came out of that was the teardrop hull, fat and round at the bow and tapering smoothly aft, closer to a blimp or a dolphin than a ship. It looks fast sitting still on the grass, and it was. She was for a time the fastest submarine in the sea, built to turn, dive and run rather than slug it out. That hull form went straight into the Skipjack class and from there into essentially every American submarine that followed. âš“
She was decommissioned in 1972 and in 1985 the city hauled her out of the water and into a purpose-dug berth ashore, which is why she now sits in what looks like a very expensive ditch beside the highway. You can walk right through her. The control room is so tight it explains a great deal about what submariners are made of. Albacore Park also keeps a memorial garden for submariners lost at sea.
Have you been aboard her, and did you fit through those hatches any better than the rest of us?
