Highway 106 through Union does not announce itself. Blink past the marina and you have already left the part of town that matters. There is no stoplight, no visible downtown grid, nothing that says a place this size should be able to host a floating concert for four hundred boats, a wine bar with eight hundred bottles on the list, and a fifteen-year-old charity golf tournament inside the span of about two weeks. But that is exactly what is happening this August, and if you live here, you have probably already felt the collision on a Friday night when you couldn't find parking near the marina and didn't know why.
The short version: Union's summer calendar has outgrown Union's footprint. Three distinct kinds of gathering, one loud and nautical, one nightly and social, one civic and quiet, are all drawing from the same few hundred yards of shoreline this month. Knowing which is which, and when, is the difference between a good weekend and a frustrating one.
The one that just rerouted traffic
Hoodstock, the Hood Canal Music & Arts Festival, held its main event this past Friday and Saturday, August 14 and 15, just north of the Hood Canal Marina, and organizers were expecting more than four hundred boats, kayaks, and floats on the water for the concert. Executive Producer Kelli Kohout has watched the event grow since its start at the Skokomish Valley Grange in 2018, through a pandemic-era pivot to a floating format in 2021, to a festival that has now donated more than $100,000 back into two causes: music programs at Hood Canal School and summer camps at the Salmon Center.
The scale showed up in the logistics. Boaters came from the Shelton Yacht Club, the Seattle Yacht Club, Pleasant Harbor, and Port Townsend. Because there is no ticket for the water show itself, support came through flags, twenty dollars for a small one and eighty for a large, sold at the Union Country Store, Union City Market, and May Mobile Marine. The town put traffic control in place downtown on the 15th to manage boat launches, with parking opened up at the Union Fire Hall on both Friday and Saturday and at the New Community Church of Union on Saturday, plus a shuttle running between lots. That is a small town temporarily building the infrastructure of a much bigger one, for one weekend, on purpose, and if you found yourself stuck behind that traffic control this past weekend without knowing why, now you do.
The one that never really stops
If Hoodstock is the loud exception, Hood Canalé has become the quieter constant. The wine and beer bar, run by owners John and Jolica out of a converted spot on WA-106, has turned into what regulars describe as the town's default living room: wood-fired Neapolitan pizza, a wine list built around roughly eight hundred bottles, and live music most Friday and Saturday nights from 7 to 9 p.m. Reservations run ninety minutes except on music nights, when a table booked at 6:30 or later holds through the full set.
The lineup keeps moving. The Lady Drinks Whiskey has become a recurring Friday act there, and Americana singer-songwriter Curtis Roy Moore, who leans into a Jimmy Buffett-heavy set list, plays a Sunday evening show on August 23. A recent remodel has changed the layout inside, according to visitors earlier this year, which is worth knowing if you haven't been in since spring.
Here is a rough read on how the back half of the month stacks up if you are trying to plan around it:
| Dates | What's running | Where |
|---|---|---|
| July 21-26 | Peace Love & Union Saltwater Songwriters Festival | Robin Hood Village Resort |
| Aug 14-15 | Hoodstock floating music festival | Hood Canal Marina waterfront |
| Aug 23 | Curtis Roy Moore, acoustic set | Hood Canalé |
| Aug 24 | Alderbrook Golf Club's 15th Annual Tournament and Ball Drop | Alderbrook Golf Club |
| Aug 28 | The Lady Drinks Whiskey, live | Hood Canalé |
Five distinct draws in five weeks, spread across maybe three venues that sit within walking distance of each other. That density is the actual story here, not any single event on its own.
The one that raises money quietly
Not everything in Union runs on music. On August 24, Alderbrook Golf Club holds its 15th Annual Golf Tournament Fundraiser and Golf Ball Drop, a morning event that supports Love INC of Mason County. Fifteen years is a long run for a single-course charity tournament in a town this size, and it says something that the event has kept its shape and its beneficiary rather than drifting toward something flashier. It is the version of Union that shows up at 9 a.m. rather than 9 p.m., and it draws a different crowd entirely from the boaters and the wine bar regulars, even though it happens on the same stretch of shoreline.
The one you go to for quiet
For contrast, there is Union City Market, sitting at the historic marina about two miles from Alderbrook, where the pace slows down considerably. It is a working retail space with local snacks, art, and gifts, paired with Hook & Fork for waterfront dining, open Thursday through Sunday. Alderbrook guests get a complimentary shuttle, and the resort also runs its own passenger vessel and kayak fleet for anyone who wants to arrive by water rather than by car. If Hoodstock is Union running at full volume and Hood Canalé is Union at conversational volume, Union City Market is the town at rest, which is exactly why it works as a counterprogram to everything else happening this month.
What the density actually means
None of these events exist because Union has grown into a bigger town. It hasn't. What has changed is that a handful of small operators, a resort, a wine bar, a market, a golf club, have each built their own following over the past several years, and this particular August is when those followings happen to overlap. That is worth knowing if you live here, because it means the marina parking lot that felt impossible on August 15 will feel completely normal again by August 20, and the crowd at Hood Canalé on a Friday night in August looks nothing like the crowd there on a Tuesday.
It also means paying attention to which event you're actually walking into. Hoodstock's flag sales and shuttle system exist because the festival outgrew informal parking years ago. Hood Canalé's ninety-minute reservation window exists because the tables turn over fast on a normal night but not on a music night. Alderbrook's ball drop keeps its own separate morning slot precisely so it doesn't compete with the evening crowd. Each piece of this calendar has been engineered, sometimes quietly, to coexist with the others.
If you've lived in Union for a while, none of this is a reason to change anything about how you spend a Saturday. It is just useful to know that the town's summer rhythm has more moving parts than it used to, and that most of those parts are worth showing up for on purpose rather than stumbling into by accident.
For anyone thinking further ahead about property in Union or elsewhere around Hood Canal, AnnaLee Baglio has spent more than three decades working these communities and can talk through what a given corner of the canal actually offers beyond the summer calendar. You can browse more on the Union neighborhood page, and when you're ready to talk specifics, Let's Connect.
