Kamoyvaer is the type of town I love to drop an FM translator into.  A translator is a low powered FM repeater. I’ve put them into small fishing towns along the Alaska Panhandle.  Kamoyvaer fits the profile, in this case fewer than 100 people, fishing based, a mixed population of indigenous and non-indigenous people, has its resident artist, and is, by some standards, isolated.

Kamoyvaer is not as isolated as the towns Raven Radio serves.  It has a road and is only about 11 kilometers from Honningsvåg.  It gets a good radio signal from nearby towns, but it has its unique needs.  At times during the winter the road is snowed in, and the town is cut off from the Honningsvåg, residents call the local radio station and ask if anyone is coming over by boat.  If so, can they bring, well it may be medicine, food, or any number of other things.  This type of announcement is familiar to Raven Radio listeners.  We call them Muskeg Messages; “To our friends in Port Alexander, Judy and Tim just had a baby boy at Mt. Edgecumbe Hospital.  We are looking for name suggestions.”  Other Alaska stations call them Caribou Chatter or Tundra Telegraph.  I have no idea what the local station calls them.  But I wanted to visit Kamoyvaer.

We, along with our friends Pam and John, got off the ship when it arrived in Honningsvåg at 10 AM.  Usually, Suzi and I get off later in the morning but today we had to play it by ear so getting off early made sense.  I am glad we did.  There were no cabs.  The tourist season starts in June and the cabs aren’t running, so no short cab ride to Kamoyvaer.   But there was a very comfortable bus leaving at 11 that offered a tour that included Kamoyvaer, a visit to a Sami family (Lapp is the Norse word for Sami, but Sami people prefer Sami) a stop at a scenic overlook AND an hour and a quarter stop at North Cape.  We took it.

At Kamoyvaer we learned a little about commercial fishing there.  The two main catches are cod, caught by longliners, and king crab with crab pots.  The main season for catching cod is January and February, when, this town at 71^o North latitude, is in darkness.  Much of the cod is hung out to dry.  The Norwegians hang it in the winter because it will not attract flies.  The dried fish is called stockfish. 

Kamoyvaer

We saw fish pens in the fjord and I asked if they farmed salmon.  They don’t.  The processing capacity can’t keep up during a heavy catch so they dump some of their fish in the pens as a holding action.

At the end of our stop visited Eva Schmutterer’s gallery “East of the Sun.”  She has a gallery, “West of the Moon,” in Honningsvåg.  I initially thought the names were a reference to the 1940 Tommy Dorsey, Frank Sinatra recording (with a great trumpet solo by Bunny Berigan) but the shops were named after a famous Norwegian fairytale also titled “The search for the lost husband.”  Eva works in collage and gets her material from the colors in old magazines.  I asked her if the demise of Look, Life and others has affected her supply.  She assured me that she’s a hoarder and has at least a 10 year supply of old magazines.

This post is a donut; it describes the outer edges of our day.  I’ll write about the donut hole, North Cape, in another post.  Let’s skip to the end. Back in Honningsvåg after we got off the bus, we walked around town, took some pictures, stopped at a shop, and enjoyed a light lunch and a coffee at a local café before getting back on Volendam. 

Honningsvåg

Our shore day lasted more than 7 hours, or us that is long, but, as it turns out, we were not finished with North Cape.