We took a one-hour bus ride northwest from Bergen to get to a small fishing village. The fishing village is on the far western edge of Norway and the land along the coast was very rocky. We went through multiple tunnels and across multiple bridges to get there. The fishing village itself was very small but picturesque as you can see in the first photo. You can also get a glimpse of the land in the background.

We went into their fishery museum, saw a short movie on the fishing industry, got a boat safety lesson and then took a short boat ride out to sea and some floating fish platforms. The boat was a rigid inflatable boat. The seats were such that you straddled them in a similar fashion to sitting on a horse, so of course Vicky had no problems as you can see in the second photo.

The third photo shows the Blom Fish Farm which is a floating platform building (not pictured) and seven attached floating net pens. The whole operation is anchored and floats in the open sea but as you can see, not far offshore. Vicky and her brother Pete are standing at the first or closest of the seven net pens.

Norway is the salmon capital of the world, or so we were told. Salmon in Norway is Big Business. This fishing operation is very high tech with lots of machines and testing for the fish. They test and check for fish health, water quality, algae, diseases, weight, and lots of other things. Most of the operation is mechanized and automated. The crew is busy around the clock raising these fish. The fourth photo just shows some of the attachments from their platform to the net pens. I didn’t get down most of the particulars but for example, the platform stores 200 tons of food, which is sent via some of the hoses in this photo. That’s about 45,000 pounds of fish food.

The last photo was taken looking down into the first net pen. These are steelhead trout and they have 116,000 in this net pen. They grow these trout to be about 10 pounds before harvesting. The other six pens all had salmon in them. This one fish farm raises about 10,000 tons, or 20 million pounds, of salmon and trout per year. It was very interesting and I wish they had let us go out to the farther net pens but at least we got this far. I really wish that I had my fishing pole with me.