Thirty-five years after first setting sail, Leelanau County’s Inland Seas Education Association (ISEA) is heading into uncharted waters.

According to ISEA Executive Director Fred Sitkins, 2024 will mark the organization’s “biggest season ever,” with more employees, more volunteers, more students, more programs, more voyages, and more public events. It’s also part of a broader shifting of the tides for the Suttons Bay-based nonprofit, with increasing program demand and the forthcoming arrival of the new Traverse City Freshwater Research & Innovation Center both promising plenty of future change. Amidst all the waves, the Leelanau Ticker checked in with Sitkins to find out what’s in store for ISEA’s ultra-busy 2024 season – and what’s awaiting on the horizon.

Since 1989, ISEA has been working to provide “leaders of all ages with hands-on experiences aboard traditionally-rigged tall ship schooners, along the shores of the Great Lakes, and in local rivers, streams, and wetlands.” From programs oriented toward school-aged kids to open-to-the-public offerings like charter sails and marine career exploration programs, Sitkins says ISEA’s work has seen a steady uptick in demand over the past few years. In 2023, the organization added a second schooner in an effort to meet that demand. This year, with both the old schooner (the Inland Seas) and the new one (the Alliance) on the water, ISEA is ready for a record-breaking year.

“We've got a really, really busy season in store for us,” Sitkins tells the Leelanau Ticker. “Both boats are fully scheduled and completely booked from the beginning of May through the middle of October. We’ve not operated two boats at this level, ever.”

Last year, the Alliance arrived mid-way through ISEA’s season. While the organization put the vessel into service almost immediately, Sitkins says the boat’s 2023 run was just a taster for what 2024 will hold.

“The timing ended up being positive for us,” Sitkins says. “It was later than we wanted, but it worked out, because our goals last year with the Alliance were really just to do a little bit of everything. We wanted to run it through its paces and figure out how best to rotate students through learning stations, where to locate those stations, etc. We needed to become familiar with the boat and all the different programs we want to operate on it. As a result, we feel like we're prepared and ready for this year.”

Having the Alliance firing on all cylinders will prompt across-the-board changes for ISEA this season, particularly around the organization’s increasingly popular overnight port-to-port treks. “Those programs are some of the most impactful programs that we offer, whether it’s taking a group of students from Sutton's Bay to Detroit, or bringing young girls from Chicago up north,” Sitkins says.

In the past, those programs came with drawbacks. For one thing, the Inland Seas was only equipped to accommodate 9-10 students on any given overnight trip. A recently-complete retrofit of the Alliance “will allow us to accommodate up to 18 students for those experiences,” Sitkins notes. “So, we’re basically doubling the number of students that we can take on for those programs.”

More overnight trips also used to mean more time away from Suttons Bay for ISEA, which in turn affected how much programming the organization could offer here in Leelanau County.

“The benefit of having two boats for the entire season is that we’ll be able to do those trips abroad, but we’ll also be home more than ever. We'll have public programming available in June, July, and August, which has been challenging for us in previous years,” Sitkins explains.

A busier schedule will also require more hands on deck. According to Sitkins, ISEA “recorded 5,639 hours of volunteer time in service to our mission” in 2022, before the Alliance joined the fleet. Last year, even with the new boat only in service for half the season, volunteer hours leaped to 9,169. This year, Sitkins anticipates ISEA will break 10,000 volunteer hours for the first time ever.

Even bigger changes are on the horizon, too. Because of the new Freshwater Research and Innovation Center, set to be built at Discover Center and Pier starting next year, ISEA will have to vacate its space there by the fall of 2025. While that space isn’t the organization’s headquarters, Sitkins says it does serve important functions for ship storage and maintenance.

Though he acknowledges that vacating Discovery Pier will be a logistical hurdle for ISEA, Sitkins is excited about the new innovation center and what it will mean for his organization.

“One of the things that I say about this region – and one of the things I feel really fortunate about – is that we have this amazing environmental ethos here,” Sitkins says. “So many organizations, so many people, so many visitors come to this region because we care about our natural resources. There's just a model of stewardship occurring in the Grand Traverse region that’s really special. [The innovation center] feeds into that, and I'm really excited about it.”

Sitkins continues: “One of our priorities has always been inspiring students to pursue careers in the STEM fields that benefit our Great Lakes. We’ve had a long-standing partnership with Northwestern Michigan College for that reason, and I think the innovation center is only going to expand those offerings. We’ll have real-life scientists that we can point students toward, to help them understand what a Great Lakes scientist actually does. And we will have really good colleges on the ground there, from NMC to Michigan Tech and beyond, where we can point students to programs that might be of interest to them to pursue future careers. There’s a lot of overlap, and it’s all positive. It’s just one more feather in our cap.”