SALT LAKE CITY – The USS Salt Lake City, a fast-attack nuclear submarine, has been deactivated by the Navy.

The deactivation ceremony was held on Wednesday at Naval Base Point Loma, Calif., the home port for the sub that spent 21 years patrolling the globe.

About a dozen members of the 716 Club – a Salt Lake City group named for the boat’s number – and Salt Lake City Councilman Carlton Christensen made the trip to the submarine base on Point Loma for the ceremony.

They joined dignitaries, guests and the 140 all-male crew in watching the Salt Lake City’s commissioning pennant, ensign and jack hauled down for the last time.

Later this fall, the submarine will make a final journey under the North Pole ice cap to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, where it will have another formal decommissioning ceremony before being dismantled.

“It’s like losing a piece of you,” Yeoman 2nd Class Ismael Maese, who served on the sub from 2001 to May of this year, told The Salt Lake Tribune.

The USS Salt Lake City was commissioned as the Navy’s 27th nuclear submarine on May 12, 1984.

It was awarded a Navy Unit Commendation on its first western Pacific deployment in 1986 for “leading the American effort to win the Cold War,” retired Navy Adm. Thomas Fargo said.