Ferries from Hasvik kai

Hasvik is on Sørøya, an island with no bridge, no tunnel and around a thousand people, facing the open Barents Sea. It has an airport, a ferry quay and 28 active sailings — and the longest of them is eighty minutes of open Arctic water.

Where the boats go

• Kårhamn — 5 sailings.
• Øksfjord (car ferry) — about 75 minutes, 4 sailings.
• Øksfjord (express boat) — about 45 minutes, 2 sailings.
• Hammerfest — about 80 minutes, 1 sailing.
• Storekorsnes — 1 sailing.

All operated by Snelandia, the Finnmark county transport authority.

⚠ Two Øksfjord services, two different boats

The car ferry takes seventy-five minutes and carries vehicles; the express boat takes forty-five and does not. They leave from different quays at the far end and run on separate timetables.

Four sailings and two sailings respectively — with a vehicle, there are four chances a day and no more.

The island in the war

When the German army withdrew from Finnmark in the winter of 1944–45 it burned almost everything and forcibly evacuated the population. Several hundred people on Sørøya refused to go and survived the winter hiding in caves and turf shelters, until British destroyers evacuated them in February 1945.

Almost every building here postdates that. It is why the architecture of Finnmark looks the way it does.

Fishing

Sørøya has a reputation among sea anglers out of all proportion to its size — halibut and coalfish in numbers that draw people from across Europe. The fishing camps are the island's main visitor industry.

The airport

Hasvik has scheduled flights to Hammerfest and Tromsø, which for a community this size is the difference between remote and cut off — and the reason a single daily boat to Hammerfest is tolerable.

Season

Year round, weather permitting — and the weather here does not always permit. Polar night from late November to late January.