Meet Bob — a very brave starter.

Alison had baked bread before. Long before kids, she'd worked through the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day cookbooks and loved the rhythm of it — mixing, waiting, shaping, baking. She'd also gotten deep into canning and preserving after getting married, filling shelves with jams and pickles and things in jars.

Then kids arrived, and with them came balancing full-time work with full-time parenting, and the pantry projects got quietly set aside. Sourdough wasn't even on the radar... it felt like the kind of thing other people did, people with more time and patience and counter space than a working mom with small children.

That all changed on a boat.

In April 2023, our family moved aboard SV Fika (our 2005 Beneteau 423) and set off to sail America's Great Loop. The Loop is a roughly 6,000-mile inland waterway route that takes you from the Great Lakes, down the rivers and canals of the interior, out to the Gulf of Mexico, around Florida, and back up the Atlantic coast. We met extraordinary people in every anchorage and marina along the way.

In September 2024, we met Bea and Tony and their kids aboard the catamaran SV Ikigai in Solomons, Maryland. We crossed paths with them again in multiple anchorages as our routes overlapped... one of those great cruising friendships that keeps finding you down the waterway. Bea was full of ideas about nutrition and cooking aboard a boat, and she brought up sourdough more than once, even offering to share her starter. She planted a seed. At the time, though, Alison wasn't ready to act on it.

In late January 2025 (only a few months after Bea had first planted the idea!) Alison met Mary and Lyle aboard SV My Bad, a Lucia 40, at an anchorage in the Bahamas. One of those boat-life moments where you meet someone remarkable and tuck their card away without realizing how much the conversation is going to matter. Mary had a completely no-fuss approach to sourdough. Lazy, even, by her own description. She made it sound manageable... something you fit into life rather than building your life around.

Bea had greased the wheels months earlier. Mary just gave the final push. A handful of cruising families had gathered aboard a mutual friend's boat that evening — kids running around, adults comparing notes on anchorages and baking in their boat galleys — when the offer came: she'd bring over some starter in the morning.

On January 27, 2025, sure enough, a dinghy appeared — Mary had actually done it, threading her way across a full, busy anchorage at Big Major Cay — and delivered a few tablespoons of sourdough starter. That was Bob's arrival into our lives.

The texts Alison sent a friend that first week tell the story pretty well:

The starter needed a name. Alison had read A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking (a middle grade fantasy novel about a fourteen-year-old baker with a magical ability to bring bread to life) by T. Kingfisher back in June 2024 — months before Bob existed, months even before Bea first brought up sourdough. So when a few tablespoons of starter arrived by dinghy in a Bahamian anchorage seven months later, the name was already waiting for it.

Our starter became Bob immediately. It felt right. The fictional Bob was brave and resilient and surprisingly capable... qualities we hoped our own Bob would share. He has not let us down.

Bob did not stay in the Bahamas for long. From his birthplace at Big Major Cay, he has since traveled with us through:

We still have the same Bob. He has survived boat life, road trips, refrigerator storage, and an enthusiastic new baker learning how to work with him. He is, in a word, resilient.

We like to think Bob would recognize himself in his fictional namesake: a starter who has been through a lot, proven himself under pressure, and shown up reliably when it mattered. He has earned his place in this kitchen.

Every loaf of sourdough focaccia from The Whiskered Woods starts with Bob. When you taste that long fermentation — the slight tang, the open crumb, the crust that crisps up in eight minutes — that's him. He worked hard for it.