For at least a dozen years, longtime Port Townsend resident and retired maritime tradesman Bernie Arthur has sought to memorialize local mariners lost at sea.

“Plenty of other seaport towns have memorials for those who have perished at sea, usually in their harbors,” Arthur said.

In 2012, he envisioned a monument in downtown Port Townsend, and agreed to donate about 100 feet of shoreline property that he owned, along the section of Water Street between the Washington State Ferries terminal and the Bayview Restaurant.

Because Arthur’s property contained intertidal lands that are considered critical to the health of the local marine environment, a number of regulatory agencies would have needed to manage different aspects of construction in that intertidal zone. This potentially would have required not just city permits, but also federal and/or state environmental reviews, with approvals from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

By 2014, Arthur was still planning to employ architectural designs for a structure drawn up by Coker DesignWorks’s Kevin Coker, to which the Port Townsend Foundry had agreed to contribute structural elements, and had minted bronze coasters depicting the proposed memorial, to encourage donations toward the effort.

Arthur purchased his 100 feet of beachfront sidewalk space for $5,000 in 2008, and donated it to Kiwanis, which the service club celebrated in a 2014 ceremony attended by the Port Townsend mayor.

By 2020, the project remained stalled, to the point that other locations were being considered in the Boat Haven or at Point Hudson, with different designs.

Now visitors to the St. Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church can find an outdoor mariners’ memorial, courtesy of Arthur and the Port Townsend Foundry. Just inside the main entrance to the primary church building, they can also find a memorial book of local lost mariners’ names compiled by Arthur.

“I have a long way to go before I can get this list up to date, and I’m already 85 years old and not getting any younger,” Arthur said, as he flipped through the plastic-protected pages of photocopied newspaper articles and printed emails. The collection wrests open-faced on a short lectern stand made from a ship’s mast.

Arthur deemed it fitting that some sort of mariners’ memorial be hosted by a church named “Star of the Sea,” and he considers his cause equivalent to a prayer.

The scope of Arthur’s attempts to track down names is expansive. He wants to honor not only those who drowned aboard passenger ships, for whom records often are not kept, but also Native Americans extending back to pre-colonial times.

To that end, Arthur asked anyone who has lost loved ones at sea to submit their names to St. Mary Star of the Sea so they can be included in the memorial book.

In the meantime, Arthur expressed his gratitude to Foundry co-owner Pete Langley for his contribution to the church’s outdoor memorial to Our Lady of Guadalupe, a concrete bench shaped like a ship’s cleat, complete with a bronze plaque. The plaque is dedicated to the alternate title for Christ’s mother, who many believe intercedes on behalf of all who travel on, or draw their livelihoods from, the sea.

A cleat is “what sailors are looking for when they get home, to tie off their ships,” said Arthur, so the bench symbolizes what those who died at sea hoped they would survive to find.