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Ketchikan Daily News

Ketchikan Daily News

Ketchikan Daily News

KETCHIKAN -- Al Berno's 37-year-old dream and hobby was turned over to its new owner, Terry Byrd, when the Lady B was launched earlier this month from Berno's waterfront yard.

The Lady B, named after Berno's wife, Mary, is a 50-foot-long, ketch-style sailboat. With its welded steel body, it was designed to fish and sail the South Pacific, or anywhere else, in comfort.

"It was just a spare-time job, in between everything else," Al said. "So, it took years to do it.

"I built it to go tuna fishing in the mid-Pacific," he said. "That's why it's an anywhere-in-the-world boat."

In 1971, Al and Mary built a shed equipped with a bridge crane and a place to store steel under cover. While working on the shed, he consulted with Ed Monk, a well-known Northwest coast boat designer.

On the floor of the shed, Berno built and leveled a cradle where he would build the Lady B. When the time came to launch the boat and the dream, the cradle would act as a rolling sled to carry it into Tongass Narrows.

Mary Berno took photos of the process and kept a scrapbook full of photos and news clippings about the project.

The early photos show the shed going up in a yard full of snow, the keel being laid in November 1972, and construction of chambers for more than 7 tons of ballast.

"You build the (steel) frames first," Al said. "And, each one I built, I picked up with the hoist and set over to the side, out of the way. When they were all built, and leaning against the side, then you lay the keel. Then you move the frames back on, one at a time."

Some of the photos were dated, and as Berno flipped the scrapbook pages, they illustrated the installing of the frames, bulkheads, decking and sides. More photos showed where foam insulation was blown onto the interior steel parts, over which the interior finishing would be built.

"Everything's steel, except the interior finish," he said. "And it's all natural finish, red cedar and yellow cedar."

The cabin also is steel, with teak plywood on its exterior.

Berno chose a ketch design for ease of handling the sails and rigging.

"Two people can handle ketch rig satisfactorily," he said. "If you go schooner rig, then you're getting involved; you've either got to have more people, or something. And we didn't want more people; just Mom and I, is what we had in mind."

But Al's work life prevented his finishing the boat in time to enjoy the dream.

"I fished in the summer and did the welding at Norm MacDonald's (Tongass Boatworks) shipyard in the wintertime," he said. "If there was nothing going on at the shipyard, I'd come home and work for a few days or a week, or whatever, until they got something going again."

The Lady B sports a GMC 671 diesel engine, a roomy galley, baseboard heating, a gear locker in the bow, a sleeping space on the forward starboard side and a head with a tub. It draws 9 feet of water.

The interior is more than 80 percent finished, he said.

The boat still needs its two masts, sails and rigging, railings and some other hardware.

It's been a bittersweet experience for the Bernos to have come so close, but then having to sell the Lady B. They've seen it launched and seen its lines the way they were made to look - in the water.

"It was kind of hard, seeing the boat go," Mary said. "But seeing her with that silhouette going down the bay just blew me away."

"She set so beautifully in the water," Al said.

But the couple won't get to share the dreamed-of voyages.

"I just got too (damned) old and got too busy; too many opportunities came by with some real money," he said. "So you think, 'Oh, I better do that,' so you sell your soul for a buck. That's about what it amounts to."

But it's not as if the boat was their only project. Along the way, they've also landscaped their 4-acre lot, built two houses and a shop on it, and have great-grandchildren to chase around.

When the Lady B's launch date arrived, Berno watched from his kitchen window as the sled was rolled on logs to a low point on the beach.

There, the Lady B waited for the high tide to pick it up and off the old cradle.

The Bernos have one daughter and three granddaughters who've given them seven great-grandchildren. Many of them were on hand to witness the transfer of the dream boat to its new owner, Terry Byrd, a Ketchikan Shipyard foreman who has dreams of his own.

"It's been my lifelong dream to own a boat like this," Byrd said after moving the Lady B to Refuge Cove Marina.

He hopes to finish the boat, then move aboard with his wife and the two grandchildren they are raising. They would live on the boat for a year or so, before cruising to Hawaii for a summer, he said.

"After that," Byrd said, "if we're comfortable with the way it handles and the way we handle it, then it's wherever the wind blows."