Ski and Paddle Norway 2009

Distance 46km | Time 11.5hrs | Ascent 0m | Descent 0m

I was up at 0700 and after breakfast took the boat out of the workshop down to the floating quay and packed it. I was finished at 0900 when everybody started to appear for breakfast outside. I said my goodbyes to Bent and Inge Skauen who were excellent hosts, the other two couples working here and also Pal and Guro; two of the very nice guests.

Bent Skauen had recommended a route through the islands to Vega and a camping spot on the south west tip of this island. It was not direct but I wanted to see the best rather than blast down. I left at 0930 on a beautiful morning.

After passing through the maze of islands and the social cluster of houses which composed Husvaer I passed under the bridge connecting it to Brasoy and then entered a relatively island free basin. Initially I headed south east towards Skaalvaer, which had a fine Lutheran church on it.

My description of a vaer a few days ago was wrong. It is not a geographical term but refers more to a social cluster where people gathered to set up houses close to the fishing grounds. More often than not these social clusters were on flat archipelagos of the sort found on the Helgelandskyst.

I went down the west side of Skaalvaer keeping close to the island and following a network of sandy channels just deep enough to kayak over. The white sand was turquoise and green in the sun. I stopped on Maasoy and then headed south west past another Hestoy island and into a wonderful archipelago of grassy islands separated by shallow sandy straights. This cluster of Islands was called Buoyene.

Buoyene was a collection of some 20 odd islands. There was a lot of curlew nesting around them and they flew around with their distinctive curved beaks making a wide a vocal range of calls. There was also a herd of very rustic sheep on the islands. I think at low tide they could cross from one island to another to make use of the grass. The sheep looked wild enough to almost be feral. There were perhaps kept for their fleece to make specialty wool.

From the Buoyene islands I passed yet another Hestoy before heading down a duck filled channel to reach Skogsholmen. Hest means horse and Hestoy must be islands where horses were put to graze in former times. I moored up at the jetty at Skogsholmen on the south east of the island in amongst the cabin cruisers. It was a Sunday.

Skogsholmen was a fertile and leafy island which had a well known guesthouse and restaurant on it. This was located in the restored school. The school was built in the 1940s and was a boarding school for the children of the Vesteroyene islands, which are found around Skogsholmen. With the downturn in the smaller scale fishing industry in the 1960s and a migration away from these islands the school was closed in 1972. The door was locked and it was abandoned to the elements for some 40 years. It was then restored with some 8000 man hours of works to put right 4 decades of neglect.

I walked the half km up the track to the school passing some of the 8 old farms which subsisted on the island. The island had a very nice feel to it indeed. There were a few guests at this lovingly restored guesthouse. Two were nice older ladies who looked like the type who might have come here for a week’s watercolour painting and reading. They seemed to fit and belong to the atmosphere.

Many of the other guests however had arrived by cabin cruiser. They were a tasteless noisy bunch who had overindulged their appetites on the spoils of oil but had not developed the wisdom to temper this indulgence. In contrast to the watercolour ladies this rabble of 40 year olds sat on the balcony drinking beer and smoking roll ups. They were as unappealing as the British on Costa del Chav, complete with barbed wire tattoos around the bingo wings. If the walk had been more than half a km from the jetty they would not have managed it.

The island was extremely dry and there was a water shortage. You could see areas where the grass was browning due to the lack of water. The woods here were extremely lush and green with an abundance of wild flowers despite the dryness. It almost felt like a Greek island in this temperature.

I returned to the kayak after a meal and then continued south. It was getting on now as I had explored all morning and I pushed on through a less dense scattering of islands to the north of Vega. Vega Island is a UNESCO World heritage Site. It has been populated for some 11000 years since the ice sheet disappeared from Scandinavia. In the last 1500 years the island inhabitants have developed a subsistence based on fishing, hunting, some agriculture and not least the collection of eggs and down from Eider ducks.

Eider ducks nest around these islands in their thousands. The islanders encourage them by building duck houses which the ducks like to nest in away from predators like seagulls. In return the islanders take some eggs and collect all the down from a nest which is about 15 grams. It takes about 80 nests to make a good duvet with at least a kg of down.

I paddled to the picturesque village of Valla and hoped to see some Vega culture but it was a small village at the end of the road. I then paddled down the west side of Vega between it and the Island of Sola. There was a strong wind against me of about force 5. And progress was slow.

The west side of Vega was rocky, mountainous and barren with the shoreline being of boulder beaches. It reminded me of Finnmark and while it was beautiful in its own right I had had enough of it. I felt a bit disappointed and was anxious I had missed the north and east side which would have given me more of a cultural insight. The beach on the south west tip did not capture me and I paddled on without stopping and started heading east along the south coast.

The south coast was teeming with otter. I saw four of them in a few km. It was a wild coast like the west coast but with a few more trees, mostly pine and birch with a few rowans also. After some four km I came to a lovely beach at Ervika. I landed on the sand and found a nice place to camp on the edge of the beach in a sandy meadow full of purple marsh orchids. I eventually had the tent up at midnight and it was getting somewhat dark.

It was a fantastic day. The islands from Skaalvaer to Skogsholmen were enchanting. The journey down the west side of Vega was perhaps a mistake but it was rectified by the beach at Ervika, and I can explore the east side on my next trip here.

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