SUMMER ADVENTURES help erase memories of winter storms and lonely January days on my island, where Galley Cat and I represent about one-tenth of the off-season population.

These past 10 days I’ve crisscrossed the state by car, officiated at a wedding, experienced broiling temperatures as well as chilly tempests, and reconnected with high-school buddies and the journalism teacher who helped launch us in our careers.

The wedding was in Walla Walla, uniting my friends Stevie Lennartson and Kevin Rineer. Stevie is the daughter of Patti Lennartson and her late husband, my old friend Barney Lennartson. Our families met when we lived on our sailboats on the same dock on Seattle’s Lake Union in the mid-1990s. Our daughters grew up together, and we shared sailing adventures from the San Juans to the British Virgin Islands.

This was the first time I’ve officiated at a wedding. I wore my father’s old captain’s hat — he was an avid sailor — because everybody knows sea captains can perform marriages. (The couple made it official at the Walla Walla courthouse, so I didn’t have to go online to get legal with the Universal Life Church.) It was an emotion-packed experience as I spoke about what made my own 41-year marriage strong.

The 11 a.m. ceremony for family and friends, outdoors by a fountain in Walla Walla’s gorgeous Pioneer Park, was perfectly timed for pleasant temperatures in the 70s. Late that afternoon, the heat topped out at a blistering 97.

The weekend held many highlights, including the groom’s parents’ hosted dinner at a Greek restaurant in Walla Walla’s pleasant downtown. Post-wedding, we enjoyed a catered taco-lunch reception in the park, and a ham dinner at Patti’s house to wind things down. Friends and family came from Florida, Montana, California and all across Washington.

For me and daughter Lillian, who traveled with me, a “low-light” was when the air conditioning failed in my old Honda, converting it to the role of mobile sauna in the Eastern Washington heat. Ah, well, these things build character, right?

After a quick return to my island for a couple days, I was off again to stay at the Hood Canal waterfront cabin of high-school friend Mark Morris, who was a photographer for Totem Talk, our Sammamish High School newspaper, back in the 1970s. Steve Miletich, another buddy and former Totem Talk staffer, joined us, along with his wife, Emily Langlie. Mark’s brother Matthew and his Bernese Mountain Doodle dog, Tigger, rounded out the party.

Mark, Steve and I — and my late wife, Barbara — were students of Sammamish journalism teacher Dianne Hanson. From her class, I ended up as Travel and Outdoors Editor at The Seattle Times. Steve was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Times. Mark became Director of Photography at California’s Sacramento Bee.

The evening at Mark’s cabin was a fun mini-reunion, in a delightful setting. Mark’s family had numerous friends who played influential roles around Seattle, and famed architect Victor Steinbrueck, who led the battle to preserve and restore the city’s beloved Pike Place Market, had designed their distinctive cabin. At high tide, Hood Canal’s saltwater rippled and seal heads bobbed just yards outside the windows. Following Mark’s excellent salmon dinner, we buoyed our already-high spirits by tuning in Vice President Kamala Harris’s feisty and fearless nomination-acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Proper journalists have to believe in democracy and the American constitution, and both are on the line this fall.

The next morning, after Mark filled us with French toast topped by four types of berries, he, Steve and I drove 25 minutes south to another remote Salish Sea island: 300-acre Stretch Island, on the far southern reaches of Puget Sound. Dianne and Jim Hanson have retired there in a modern cabin perched on a hillside almost 100 stair-steps above the water.

My buddies and I recently attended our 50-year high-school reunion, so it stands to reason that few of our teachers are still alive. But Dianne Hanson (nee White, when she first started teaching) was a special case: Two years before taking on the challenge of corralling our Class of ’74 news staff and containing the mayhem we tended to strew, she started teaching at age 21. In her first months, she was barely three years older than some of her students. But her energy trumped experience at the time, and her freshly-minted degree made her a font of contemporary knowledge. Exercising a firm hand with us when appropriate, Ms. Hanson loosened the leash when we were investigating and writing with the righteous zeal of youth. Among other things, our newspaper played a key role in blocking ROTC training from the school, on the grounds that it represented political indoctrination of teens not yet old enough to vote. Our writing on the subject attracted Seattle TV stations to cover a school-board hearing where the proposal was quashed in a 2-1 vote.

Having started teaching so young, Dianne is now only in her early 70s, and apparently never learned about the aging process. OK, she’s coloring her hair with more gray highlights, but that’s about it.

Dianne was delighted that we’d tracked her down, and we had a pleasant lunch and hours of catching up with her and “Jaunty Jim,” as we bratty students had dubbed her affable husband when he was in his 20s. Because publishing the newspaper regularly involved hours of after-school work at a professional print shop in Seattle, back in the day Jim often stopped by after work to check in with his wife. We had all become friends. This visit, we all vowed to meet again.

From Stretch Island, I drove friend Steve back to his family’s summer beach-home on northern Puget Sound. His wife, Emily, is a granddaughter of Arthur B. Langlie, a one-time Seattle mayor and three-term Washington governor, whose family has spent many decades of summers at their beach home.

August seemed to morph into November that afternoon. Low clouds doused the sun and shrouded the distant view of the Seattle skyline. A brisk southerly sent Puget Sound waves dancing as if a kid was kicking autumn leaves. Despite the tumult, Emily went for her daily swim, espousing the health benefits of a cold-water dip. (Her family’s Norwegian heritage might have something to do with that.) I shivered and cautioned her about hypothermia. At dinnertime, from the front windows of the Langlies’ delightfully creaky, century-old, salt-pickled beach house we enjoyed nature’s own choreography as we filled up on chicken curry and sipped a good rosé.

Today, back at the Nuthatch, with a happily dramatic reversal of weather, I’m toiling over the keyboard in my cheerful writing hut and listening on my desktop speakers, appropriately, to Johnny Nash singing about a “bright, bright sunshiny day.”

Summer continues on my little island nobody’s heard of. I’m going to keep storing up memories for the winter ahead.