Donny Knowles
YAMACRAW, a 54’6” Chesapeake Bay buyboat, has been in service since her launching in 1922. She still carries cargo among the Bahamian Exuma Islands chain.
1030 hours, January 19, 2024
Central wharves, Nassau, Bahamas
Partly cloudy, wind southwest at 5 knots
“Oh, we were on a mission. Yeah, mon,” remembers Capt. Mike “Mikie” Goodwin. He’s watching a trio of stevedores loading a large miter saw down the main hatch of his cargo vessel, YAMACRAW. Ziggy Marley is blaring from a box truck’s stereo nearby.
“It was the summer of 1978,” he says, “I was 21. My brothers Tommy, Pat, and I were on a road trip in my hippie van from Florida to the Chesapeake to find a boat.”
Mikie is 68 now, but he remembers that road trip like it was yesterday. It changed the vector of his life, and YAMACRAW’s. The Goodwin brothers had seen a vessel of YAMACRAW’s type about a year earlier. They had grown up in Nassau, the sons of a longtime Bahamian sailing family, and were sailing Pat’s traditional Class B Bahamian racing sloop, RHONDI LOUISE, to the Out Island Regatta in George Town, 125 miles south of Nassau in the Exuma Cays.