DIMENSIONS: 119′ long, 225 British registered tons, Diesel, 1 propeller, 375 horsepower, 12 knots
“Yes this is correct they were built on #3 ways and the foreman was Jenkins Roberts the father of Dawson Roberts. We also built a 220 foot freighter Caribbean Queen shortly afterwards.”
During the war either Stede Bonnet or Church Bay was, according to survivors of the ATHELQUEEN, armed with a medium sized deck gun (machine gun?) from the British tanker ATHELQUEEN which was sunk by the Italian sub ENRICO TAZOLLI off Abaco Island, Bahamas in mid March. The men all got away in 3 lifeboats and managed to take a gun with them. It was mounted on a local craft in Nassau but no further history of it.
HMS MMS 194 was laid down 18 Aug. 1941 and launched 4 June 1942
Her pennant was J694, she was an MMS I class vessel and was decommissioned in March of 1946
“….a charter party executed at Miami, Florida, and dated February 5, 1952, by which the defendant, Three Bays Corporation, Ltd., a Nassau corporation, appellee here, chartered the M/V “Church Bay” to the plaintiff, J. B. Effenson Company, a Florida corporation, appellant here, for two voyages between Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, and Miami. Diversion for one trip to a Mexican port was sought by the plaintiff and permitted by the defendant. The plaintiff requested and the defendant granted an indefinite extension of the charter party. The vessel was used in the banana trade.”
Source: https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/238/238.F2d.611.16200_1.html 238 F.2d 611
In 1964 she was spotted by a memoirist loaded for Grand Bahama:
“The Church Bay is bound north for Grand Bahama”
Source: Benedict Thielen “The Bahamas-Golden Archipelago”, Holiday December 1964, pp. 62- 73, 135-140, http://www.jabezcorner.com/grand_bahama/golden1.htm, from Bits and Fragments from the History of the Bahamas.
Source: Nassau Tribune, 11 January 1973 – Front Page, http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00084249/03243, c/o George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Caribbean Newspaper Digital Library
Either Church Bay or Stede Bonnet, its sister ship in Nassau Harbor, south Prince George Wharf,