Sundbåten Schedules 2026

Sundbåten has carried people across Kristiansund harbour since 1876, and the company makes a claim few can: it is the oldest public transport company in the world still in continuous operation.

Free, and that has always been the point

Every crossing is free of charge. Kristiansund is built on four separate islands — locals call them the four "lands" — and the boats are what makes them one town. They run every weekday, linking Kirkelandet, Innlandet, Nordlandet and Gomalandet, with crossings of four to nine minutes.

The app knows where you are

The Sundbåt app — on iOS, Android and in a browser — shows the next departure and the nearest quay at any moment. On a network where four landings sit within a small harbour and the boat is never far away, knowing which quay to walk to matters more than reading a timetable. A PDF timetable is published alongside it.

Voted a heritage monument by the people who use it

In 1997 the residents of Kristiansund chose Sundbåten as their cultural monument — not a museum piece, but the working boat service they ride to work on.

More than commuting

The company runs guided harbour tours with a storyteller, island-hopping trips to all four islands, and the Gripruta out to Grip. MS Angvik is fitted for meetings and lunches. A Sundbåtsafari booklet on board carries questions about each island and about the boats themselves. An accessibility statement is published separately.

A single loop, not six separate lines

The published timetable runs the whole harbour as one circuit: Kirkelandet → Innlandet → Nordlandet → Kirkelandet → Melkvikan → Gomalandet → Kirkelandet, repeating roughly every 45 minutes from early morning until after nine at night. Each leg takes four or five minutes, so a full lap of Kristiansund is about half an hour.

The fleet, and what each boat is for

Five boats, only one of which is a workhorse. MS Angvik (2005, 15.6 m, 63 passengers) carries the scheduled service — up to 17 hours a day, six days a week. MS Framnæs (2012, 47 passengers) is a replica of the ferga that worked the harbour from 1916 to 1951 and carries both a diesel engine and a steam engine; it stands in as reserve and runs tours. MS Rapp (1958) was in scheduled traffic until 2014 and is now preserved as a listed cultural monument under the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage. MS Kvikk was built as an ambulance boat in 1987, converted and lengthened in 2008–09, and at 20 knots serves the Grip route. MS Nordsund (1965) spent 18 years outside the company and was bought back in November 2023; it is being refitted at Storvik mekaniske verksted — the same yard that built it.

Green hull, yellow fender — the last of its kind

Those are the old livery colours of Norwegian public conveyance, and Sundbåten is the only operator still carrying them. The company counts more than 132 million passengers since 1876 and reckons its accumulated distance across the harbour amounts to a circumnavigation of the globe every year and a half. The annual record still stands from wartime: 2,635,900 passengers in 1943–44.

What free actually costs

When a city councillor claimed in September 2025 that free travel was costing the municipality up to 6 million kroner a year, the company published the figures. Foregone ticket revenue is 1.5 million kroner; the 6 million is the municipality's total support for running Sundbåten both as public transport and as a heritage asset. Cutting it, the company noted, would mean closing the service.

Grip

From May to September the company also runs to Grip, an old fishing village on an island 15 km out to sea, aboard MS Kvikk — about 35 minutes each way, sold as a 3.5-hour round trip with an optional guided walk to the stave church.