Hjertøya - Fisheries Museum

The island of Hjertøya lies a small distance from the town of Molde and is home to a very unique fisheries museum.
Old buildings have been gathered together, on the island, in the form of a fishing village from the past. Houses fishermen's böds (that's the Shetland word for them), a farm house, a school, workshops, boat houses, etc.
Housed in these buildings are a wide range of displays which depict life in a historical fishing community.

Here's a picture of the island as seen from Varden (The Ward) above Molde. Pity it was a hazy day, the mountains in the background are spectacular.

The island really is an amazing beauty spot. The museum is at the east end, but a walk west along the island reveals scenes like these.

There are some boats floating in the bay. This one is a Færing (Shetland name: Fourareen).

And this one is a Seksring (Shetland name: Sixareen).

It's easy to see from both the appearance, and the names, that the Shetland boats are well connected with Norway. The main reason for this being that, until about 1860, boats from Norway were imported to Shetland in flat pack form, and re-assembled on Shetland. It later became cheaper to import the raw materials, but by then the designs had become accepted as seaworthy, so why change a good thing.

Here's some of the assorted sheds which adorn the shoreline.

One of the larger sheds houses a collection of old boats.

There's a fairly broad cross section of the various craft which were built in west Norway, and among them some weird ones, like this.

What's odd about it, certainly when compared to the style of boatbuilding that most folk would recognise, is the way that the beam is maintained much farther forward than should be expected. The reason can be seen in this picture of the forrard planking.

Weird, ain't it?  But maybe just as weird, for a person like me who expects to see at least 5 or six boards in a boat, this one has only 3.

It must have been a bad design for boards splitting, but it certainly gives the boat a sharp line in the water.

It would take dozens of pictures to show the smaller display items, but this caught my eye. Old floats, with the fisherman's name on them.

The downside of the displays, from my personal opinion, is that they exhibit horrible hellery, like this harpoon gun, from the whaling... Only thing I can think to get angry with Norway for,,,, Whaling.. GRRR!!!

Back to more pleasant things. In the farmhouse this old stove caught my attention.

Very ornate stoves are a great feature of Norwegian history, so no doubt I'll dig up more of them in the future.

The island, and the museum is absolutely stunning, I could go on about it for ages but best I stop for now...

Yun's aa fir enoo.