The List that Launched a Lifestyle
Thomas Toombs, Owner and Publisher of Dockside Guide
How a napkin full of local knowledge became the Gulf Coast’s essential guide to life on the water
There’s a moment every boater knows. You’re idling somewhere between Mobile Bay and the pass, sun high, cooler packed, and somebody on the back of the boat asks the question: “Where are we going?” Not in the existential sense — in the very practical sense of whether the draft on your boat will let you get there, whether the kids can swim, whether the dog is welcome, and whether there’s a floating dock or you’re jumping from the bow onto the beach in front of strangers.
Thomas Toombs has been answering that question for a long time. He just didn’t realize he was building a business doing it.
As with all good stories and great ideas, this one starts with a napkin at a restaurant. On it, Thomas scratched out his favorite places to go by water — every worthwhile stop between Mobile Bay and Perdido Key, written down the way you write things when the thought feels too important to lose. That napkin became a list. The list grew for the better part of ten years. And the list became Dockside Guide.
When friends around Lower Alabama — families with boats, families with weekend plans and no real intelligence about where to go — would call him up before heading out on the water, he’d rattle off what he knew. How deep is it? Is it suitable for a 40-foot boat or an 18-foot skiff? Floating docks or fixed? Can you get high-octane fuel, or will you wait forever at a low-flow pump filling your sportfish? Is it a date-night spot, or a bring-the-whole-crew kind of place? Where can you grab ice, sunscreen, a cold drink for the kids, or a spare part you didn’t know you’d need until you needed it?
“Everybody is going to the same two or three spots,” Thomas says, “because those were the ones they knew.” The napkin — and everything that grew from it — was his way of expanding that universe, sharing real-world information so that a day on the water didn’t have to default to the familiar just because the new place felt like a gamble.
Last weekend, at the Wharf Boat and Yacht Show, marked one year for the public introduction of Dockside Guide. What started as a scrawl on a restaurant napkin is now a full-fledged coastal resource built around three simple pillars: Eat. Boat. Stay. The guide currently lists 40 restaurants and 35 other dockside destinations in Lower Alabama — spanning the causeway, Dog River, Dauphin Island, Bon Secour, the Intracoastal Waterway, Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, and Perdido Key, Florida. It tells you what you actually need to know: dock depth, dock type, fuel availability, kid friendliness, dog friendliness, and whether the vibe calls for flip-flops or something a little nicer. It has just expanded digitally into Pensacola, Tampa Bay, and Charleston — because it turns out boaters everywhere are asking the same questions.
A Life Shaped by the Coast
Thomas Toombs came into all of this the long way around, which might be exactly why he was the right person to build it.
He was born at the old Naval Air Station Pensacola hospital, and as a boy he played freely at Fort Barrancas long before it became a museum — back when it was just a place a kid could wander and wonder. His family moved, as military families do, and Thomas spent his formative years and college elsewhere. But there was always a thread pulling him back to the coast: his grandmother’s cottage in Belle Fontaine, on the quiet western shore of Mobile Bay.
He spent so many summers there, sleeping in a hammock on the screened porch, listening to the bay breathe at night, that he was well past 18 before he understood that going inside was actually an option. The porch and the dock were the point. The bay was the point.
When a corporate opportunity brought him back to Mobile — what he figured would be a two-year stint — turned into their forever place. He and his wife Carriann landed in Fairhope and simply never left. The coast has a way of doing that. They put down roots the way people do when somewhere feels right. They started The Neighborhood School in Daphne, which celebrates 30 years of caring for families this May. They also built out Black Angus Construction, and Thomas spent decades building homes for people across the area before retiring from that chapter of his life. They are especially proud that their three daughters remember they were raised along Mobile Bay, no matter where their lives take them.
The Dockside Guide is the next one.
Thomas will tell you his vision for what a successful Dockside Guide looks like in practice, and it’s delivered with the particular kind of grin that suggests he’s already half-living it: he wakes up in the morning, walks down to the boat, puts it in the water, and goes to see some people. He has a hamburger and a Pabst Blue Ribbon for lunch somewhere with a good dock. He catches a band playing in the afternoon somewhere along the shore. Then he goes to visit a few more places — by water, always by water — before heading home. Maybe there will be time that evening for fishing from the dock with a shrimp under a popping cork.
That’s what Dockside Guide is, at its heart: an invitation to stop defaulting to the same two or three spots, to trust that the information is good, and to let a day on the water surprise you. Thomas Toombs put pen to napkin so that you wouldn’t have to wonder. Now it’s your turn to go find out.