A weekend every season.

Six aboard, three nights.

The big voyages happen once a year and take twenty. Between them we want the thing that only a small boat gives: six people, three nights, one table, and no way to drift to the edge of the room. A weekend is short enough that busy people can come and long enough that strangers stop being strangers. We hold one every season, because the water is a different place in each, and because a habit is worth more than an event.

A theme, a goal, and an ask.

The theme is what the season provides. We do not choose it so much as read it off the calendar: the dark season, the herring, the returning light. It decides where we go and what we look at, and it gives the conversation a subject bigger than any of us.

The goal is something made by Sunday. A short record of the water as we found it, in the log and in whatever else it turns into: a set of readings, a chart, a page of drawings, a question sharpened enough to carry home. It joins the record the voyage started, and it is sent to everyone aboard within the week.

The ask is of everyone. Each person brings one short offering to give at anchor, a piece of work, a hunch, a story that keeps coming back; each person takes a turn in the galley and a turn on the log; and everyone sails the boat, with guidance. We share the cost of the boat, the food and the consumables between us. Phones go in a drawer on the Thursday.

The seasons

Fall · The Long Dark Sail

Between October and February very few people convene on this water. The anchorages are close to empty, the days are short, and the water is at its clearest. Hood Canal or the South Sound. What we explore: what a coast does when the people leave it alone, how the light changes what you can see into the water, and what a long evening below decks does to a conversation. The first storms of the winter are part of the reading, and December is the darkest of the set.

• 5 to 8 NovFirst week of the dark. The clocks have gone back.
• 12 to 15 NovMid November. The first real storms of the winter.
• 3 to 6 DecThe darkest weekend of the set. Lights on early, long evenings below.

Winter · The Herring Run

In late winter the herring spawn turns the shallows milky, and everything that eats arrives with them: sea lions, diving ducks, gulls, eagles in the trees. The San Juans, wherever the spawn is that week. What we explore: who counts what returns each year, what the count says about the Sound, and what it would take to count some of it ourselves, from a small boat, with the instruments we can carry.

• 25 to 28 FebMid-spawn most years.
• 18 to 21 MarLate spawn, longer days, the first grey whales in the Sound.
• 25 to 28 MarThe equinox just behind us. The Sunday is Easter.

Spring · A Return to the Light

The first bloom in the water, grey whales working north, the islands waking up. The Gulf Islands, across the border, so bring a passport. What we explore: the year's first growth and how to read it, the communities that live on these islands year round, and where a second Island Lab could live, what it would need from a place and what it would give back.

• 1 to 4 AprThe first days of April, the bloom starting.
• 13 to 16 MayThe bloom, most years, and long light.

Petrichor, briefly.

A Catalina 36 we have sailed the Salish Sea in for years, and raced to Alaska in 2024. Berths for six in total, a proper galley, a saloon table that seats everyone, a diesel heater, one head, and finite water and power, which are part of the curriculum. She lives at Shilshole Bay Marina in Seattle: aboard from 5pm on the Thursday, back alongside by 3pm on the Sunday. Pack as you would for the voyage, foul-weather kit, wool, a sleeping bag rated to freezing, a soft duffel; the voyage packing list is the reference.

Tell us when you could come.

Each season has two or three candidate weekends, listed above and on its own page. We are asking for your availability, not a maybe: tick every weekend you could make, and mean it. The first weekend in a season that fills the boat is the one that goes. We write to everyone who ticked it, and to everyone else who ticked a date in that season with the news and the next season's options. A season that never fills does not go.

Island Lab is a practice in coastal resilience: experiments in bringing people, places and ideas together, on ships we charter and on our members' own boats. Every gathering, past and coming, is at islandlab.dev/gatherings.