Ferries from Arsvågen ferjekai

Norway's E39 runs about 1,100 kilometres up the west coast and it is not a continuous road. Fjords cut it repeatedly, and at each cut a ferry carries the traffic. Årsvågen is one of those cuts — the northern side of the Boknafjord crossing, where the trunk road stops at a slipway and resumes twenty-four minutes later on the other shore.

A trunk road with a boat in it

Årsvågen to Mortavika takes about 24 minutes. Our timetable holds 113 sailings in this direction and 116 the other way, worked by Fjord1.

Those numbers are what a road looks like when it floats. This is not an island service with a morning and an evening boat; it is a shuttle running at short headways all day because the alternative is a national highway with a gap in it.

Which side is which

Årsvågen sits on Bokn, the northern shore, pointing toward Haugesund and on to Bergen. Mortavika is on Rennesøy to the south, toward Stavanger.

Getting the direction right matters when you are booking accommodation rather than a ticket: the two quays are a fjord apart and the drive around is not a realistic alternative.

⚠ Frequency is not the same as capacity

A boat every twenty minutes sounds like a service you can ignore, and most of the year you can. Summer weekends and the Friday afternoon exodus out of Stavanger are the exceptions, when the queue at the slipway can run to more than one sailing.

There is no reservation system on this crossing. If you are on a schedule — a flight, a booked cabin further north — treat a full boat as a realistic outcome and leave a sailing's worth of slack.

What replaces it, and when

The Rogfast subsea tunnel is under construction beneath this fjord and is planned to open in 2033, at which point the crossing closes. The Mortavika page covers the tunnel and the toll that has been on your ferry ticket since 2013.

Until then this remains one of the busiest vehicle ferry crossings in Norway, and the practical planning advice does not change.

Paying and boarding

Drive on, and a camera reads the plate. Norwegian road ferries bill through AutoPASS rather than a ticket booth, walk-on passengers are free, and prepaid accounts carry a substantial discount. There is nothing to buy in advance and nothing to show on boarding.