A SAILOR’S SOURDOUGH Bread comes to life on a honeymoon cruise
by Lauren Upham
I
trundled out of our berth to make some breakfast and, when shuffling past the basket where we kept our produce, I saw it. It was finally going! Going so well it had overflowed and started to ooze onto the other items in the basket. My excitement was briefly eclipsed by frustration at the mess I had to clean up, but this was it. This was the day we could finally make bread with the sourdough starter that we started while on our honeymoon cruising adventure in British Columbia. We had gotten married in June in Santa Barbara, California, and would be moving up to Vancouver, British Columbia, for my husband’s new job in November. We hadn’t planned a honeymoon before our wedding, but afterwards, found ourselves with enough time to plan and execute an epic adventure. It would be fun to sail somewhere for our honeymoon, where could we do that? Why not in beautiful British Columbia? What better way to get to know our new home? Instead of doing a charter, we decided to buy a sailboat that we could keep in Vancouver. We found a dark-hulled J/40 in Anacortes, Washington, that would do the trick and the sale of the boat went through at the end of August. After visiting family for a few weeks in September, we were ready to provision the boat — which we had rechristened Velella — and set out. While I had grown up sailing and racing, I had never done any long-term cruising. Before this trip, the longest I had been on a boat without an opportunity to grocery shop was four days. We were planning to be on the boat for 45 days. Albeit, we would have the opportunity to shop multiple times during our trip, but the timing of those stops and the availability of supplies at the
48º NORTH
store were unknown. I read a lot of provisioning blogs from other cruisers, and made three trips to the grocery store with full carts and loaded up Velella. Throughout the entire provisioning process, the one and only thing I was confident in was the fact that we could make our own bread. I bought flour and yeast and we made several delicious loaves of bread, slightly burnt on the bottom, but they were not sourdough. My husband and I both love sourdough and, several years ago, he gave me bread making supplies in the hopes that I would create a sourdough starter and supply us with delicious bread all the time. I always found excuses to not do it. Primarily, the time and schedule required to maintain it did not seem attainable while working full-time and having an active social life. Now that the two of us were on a boat with no jobs and no friends, there was nothing I could do but say “yes” when my husband suggested that we make a sourdough starter. Our general plan was to sail quickly north to the Broughton Archipelago and spend the most time exploring islands and inlets up there before making our way down through Desolation Sound on our way back to Vancouver. A few days into our trip, we had made it quickly through the San Juan Islands and cleared Canadian customs in Poets Cove before heading up through the Gulf Islands. We anchored for a night in Madrona Bay, just east of Ganges Harbour on Salt Spring Island. It was a gray day and raining off and on, which was the weather we expected for most of the trip. We geared up and took the dinghy over to Ganges to pick up a few supplies, including the flour we needed for the starter. Sourdough starters are made from incredibly basic
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