Rest and excursion day at Andenes

Day 21/Friday 2nd August. 0 km. Today’s plan was hire car and have Stein guide us around his old territory in and around Andenes.
When Stein was here 46 years ago as platoon leader, Andenes was a military hub with ca 1500 military personnel out of 8000 inhabitants in the municipality.
Today there are maybe 150 left. So a lot has changed.
Many former military buildings have become private accommodation often well kept and upgraded.
Others are perhaps still military with minimum maintenance to keep dilapidation at bay.
And other buildings are just left to disappear. The latter was very successful in the case of Stein’s old office which was completely rewilded!
While we were driving around in the car Karianne read aloud from the local history wiki.
Short summary: Andenes has been a very important community in Vesterålen for hundreds of years, particularly due to the rich fishing on both sides of the island.
Adding that (at least some geologists) think that Andøya was ice free during the last ice age, it may have been an important toe hold for flora and fauna for more than 100 thousand years.
Jokes aside the depth and complexity of the history of places like this, gives pause for thought for “capital city” dwellers like ourselves.
And Andøya does not go backwards into the future. We drove past installations of the current “cornerstone” activity: Space exploration and satellite launches, and. We also drove past a big plant where they prepare to do onshore salmon farming, maybe the next step forward.
In short Andøya has seen massive changes in its economy over the last decades, but has managed well and is still thriving.
The one constant is fisheries, the harbor is still full of fishing vessels of all sizes, and there is a lot of foshing gear in the water as we paddle past.
We lunched at Bleik, in the CoopPrix shop that has an attached cafe lite.
When a community gets down to a certain size and cars make services centralized, the local shop becomes a key hub for the community. This we have seen all along the coasts we have paddled.
Since this was a day of special interests, we also took the time needed for Erling to localize an old well head from the early seventies, when the company Norminol drilled four exploration wells for oil.
Part of the team that did that exploration was Erling’s former colleague and mentor the late Terje Enoksen.
And the one person that knows most about the geology and history is Erling’s now retired colleague and friend Peter Midbøe.
The two has been in constant communication about the geology at Ramså, where a geology excursion is planned for lunch on Saturday.
The rest of the team has requested that the scribe maybe make the geology a separate entry, for the especially specially interested.
Will do.
Tomorrow we paddled on south along the east coast of Andøya.Les mer