More Than 250 Days Without a Liberty Port: USS Abraham Lincoln and the Navy Traditions That Hold Crews Together
Shellbacks, Golden Dragons, Iron Shellbacks, and whether an extraordinary deployment deserves a tradition of its own
August 22, 2026
1 An aircraft carrier can make its own fresh water, generate enough electricity for a small city, launch combat aircraft around the clock and remain at sea for months. What it cannot manufacture quite so easily is a change of scenery.
For the sailors and Marines aboard USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), that distinction has become painfully important. The carrier left San Diego on November 21, 2025, for what began as a Pacific deployment. It was later redirected to the Middle East, where its crew supported months of combat operations. By August 20, 2026, Lincoln had been deployed for 272 days and had gone 252 days without a normal liberty port call, according to USNI News. A brief logistics stop in Oman allowed resupply and limited access ashore for some personnel, but it was nothing resembling the ordinary port visits that traditionally give crews a genuine break from life aboard ship. USS George Washington has now arrived in the region to relieve Lincoln, and the long voyage home has begun. It may still take a month or more before the carrier reaches the West Coast.
Those numbers are remarkable, but numbers can hide what life aboard a carrier actually means. Roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines have lived within the same steel hull through months of extended operations, long workdays, uncertainty and few opportunities to step away from the ship. Families and sailors have publicly raised concerns about exhaustion, living conditions and mental health. The Navy has said counselors, chaplains, medical personnel and other support remain available aboard ship and that leaders continue to monitor the psychological readiness of the crew. Some reported supply and quality-of-life problems have improved, but nobody disputes the basic fact that this has been an unusually demanding deployment.
That makes something as old-fashioned as a naval ceremony suddenly seem much less trivial.
For centuries, sailors have taken invisible lines drawn across maps and turned them into milestones. Crossing the Equator meant entering the realm of King Neptune. Those who had never crossed were Pollywogs. After completing the traditional Crossing the Line ceremony, they became Shellbacks and members of the Ancient Order of the Deep. Cross the Arctic Circle and a sailor could become a Blue Nose. Cross the Antarctic Circle and a Red Nose. Round Cape Horn and there was another title. Sail around the world and another. The Navy accumulated an entire mythology based not upon rank or combat decorations, but simply upon one question: Where have you been?
Among those traditions is the Domain of the Golden Dragon, entered when a ship crosses the 180th meridian and International Date Line. The certificate is unofficial, often decorated with spectacular dragons, sea creatures and mock-royal language. Sailors have carried versions of these documents home for generations. Ghosts of the Battlefield preserves a 1944 Golden Dragon certificate issued to Seaman First Class Richard C. Witzel after he crossed the Date Line aboard a U.S. Army transport during World War II. Militarily, his certificate meant almost nothing. Personally, it meant enough that he kept it, allowing that tiny moment from a wartime voyage to survive more than eight decades.
That may seem far removed from the nuclear-powered carrier now steaming home toward San Diego, but the reason these traditions existed has hardly changed.
Life at sea is repetitive. One day can resemble the one before it and the one after it. During an extended deployment, especially one in which the expected return date keeps moving farther away, crews need milestones. Birthdays and holidays help. Flight-deck cookouts help. Mail helps. A port visit certainly helps. So do the strange ceremonies sailors have inherited from generations before them.
The Naval History and Heritage Command specifically describes the modern Crossing the Line ceremony as voluntary and conducted largely for entertainment and morale. That is important. The ridiculous costumes, certificates, King Neptune courts and imaginary maritime kingdoms were never really about geography. They gave a crew something different to do together and transformed another day underway into one that could be remembered.
None of this should be romanticized into an answer for genuine exhaustion or mental-health concerns. A certificate cannot substitute for sleep, functioning equipment, adequate supplies, communication with family, professional support or a sailor finally walking down the brow at home. Tradition is not treatment.
But morale has never been built from one thing. Sometimes it is built from something to anticipate. And there is precedent for creating something new.
In 2020, USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and USS San Jacinto found themselves in an extraordinary situation. COVID-19 had eliminated normal port visits, and their crews remained continuously at sea for months. After more than 100 days without touching a port, the ships crossed the Equator.
They already had a tradition for crossing that line: Shellback.
But what those sailors had just accomplished seemed different enough to deserve something more.
Eisenhower petitioned the Naval History and Heritage Command to commemorate the combination of more than 100 consecutive days at sea and crossing the Equator with a new title. On May 14, 2020, sailors aboard Eisenhower and San Jacinto became the Navy's first Iron Shellbacks. A new naval tradition had just been created aboard ships doing something unusual under circumstances nobody had planned for.
Four years later, USS Abraham Lincoln embraced the same idea.
During its 2024 deployment, Lincoln conducted its own Crossing the Line ceremony after being at sea for more than 100 days. The ship's media department even designed an elaborate Iron Shellback certificate commemorating the occasion. The Navy graphic survives publicly today, complete with King Neptune imagery and all the splendidly unnecessary decoration these documents demand. Simply spending more than 250 days at sea does not make Lincoln's current crew Iron Shellbacks. That distinction combines more than 100 continuous days at sea with crossing the Equator.
That matters because it proves these traditions are not frozen relics from wooden sailing ships. They evolve. Sailors inherit traditions from the people who sailed before them, but occasionally a crew experiences something unusual enough that they add a new chapter.
The current Abraham Lincoln crew may now have such an opportunity.
The exact movements of a deployed carrier are appropriately determined by operational requirements, and we do not know every stop Lincoln will make during the journey home. But should her return across the Pacific take her through the International Date Line, the ship will enter the old Domain of the Golden Dragon.
For sailors who have never crossed the Date Line before, that alone is a legitimate naval milestone.
But consider the circumstances under which this particular crew would cross it. They would not simply be another carrier crew halfway through a routine Pacific cruise. They would be sailors and Marines coming home after an unexpectedly extended deployment, more than 250 days without a conventional liberty port call, months of combat operations and one of the longest stretches away from normal port liberty experienced by a modern carrier crew.
That Date Line could mean something more than changing the calendar.
It could become the line between deployment and homecoming.
If operational requirements and command discretion allow, Lincoln could mark the crossing by embracing the old Golden Dragon tradition, whether through certificates, a voluntary shipboard event, or another morale activity created for the occasion. Modern ceremonies are voluntary, and they need not resemble the rough initiations sometimes associated with old Navy lore. A shipwide event could be simple: Golden Dragon certificates for first-time crossers, a special meal or steel-beach picnic, an artwork or certificate-design competition, music, contests between departments and perhaps messages from families waiting on the other side of the Pacific.
For a few hours, the crew would have something besides watches, maintenance schedules, flight operations and the number of days remaining before San Diego.
They would have crossed another line together.
And perhaps Lincoln could go farther.
The unofficial nature of these naval traditions is precisely what makes them flexible. 2
Nobody in Washington sat down two centuries ago and issued instructions establishing every Shellback variation. Sailors created them. Ships modified them. Certificates changed. New geographic milestones appeared. In 2020, when circumstances created an achievement the old terminology did not quite capture, Eisenhower simply asked whether the Navy could recognize something new. The answer was Iron Shellback. 3
So perhaps the sailors aboard USS Abraham Lincoln should be given the same opportunity.
If they cross the International Date Line on their journey home, after more than 250 days without a normal liberty port call, perhaps that crossing deserves a distinction of its own. We could invent a name from shore, but that would rather miss the point. The name should belong to the crew that earned it. Maybe they choose a dragon forged by months at sea. Maybe they combine an older title with something reflecting this deployment. Maybe the ship's artists create a certificate every bit as wonderfully excessive as the Golden Dragons and Shellbacks sailors carried during World War II. Or perhaps they invent something nobody outside the ship would ever think of. That is how naval tradition is supposed to work. The certificate would not be an official decoration. It would not appear beside campaign medals or ribbons. It would not erase the hard parts of this deployment, nor should anyone pretend it could.*
It would simply say:
We did this.
We were here together.
And we came through it.
*Any new title seeking broader Navy recognition would ultimately need command support and recognition similar to the process Eisenhower used when it petitioned Naval History and Heritage Command for the Iron Shellback title in 2020.
1=02.28.2026 Courtesy Photo U .S. Central Command Public Affairs
2=12.11.2024 Graphics by Seaman Malina Davy USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72)
3= 11.28.2024 Graphics by Seaman Malina DavyUSS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72)