Sukkertoppen and a chance encounter.

Been busy, 2 day late blog entry😳

It was a gorgeous morning at the Bobil parking lot and it was tempting to stay put and spend another day in Alesund, but we wanted to climb the little hill called Sukkertoppen-Sugartop on the Hessa peninsula across the harbour area to get a view down onto the town and the surrounding islands. We could have cycled round and locked the bikes up somewhere while we climbed the hill, but it was decided that we would pack the van and move on after our walk. Quite a few vans were leaving and as soon as a space became available another waiting van shot right in, this was a prime Bobil parking estate. We were soon ready to go after breakfast, said goodbye to our friendly German neighbours and got going, by now unfortunately a low cloud was rolling in and shrouding the islands, and the hill we wanted to climb, Hmmm!! I did question if it was worth the climb, but we stuck to our guns drove round and headed up into the woods and cloud to climb the hill. It's quite a rough path with lots of slippery tree roots which will still slimy after last nights rain. We climbed up still in clouds but I had a suspicion it was patchy and would break and that's what happened, so we did get some really nice views down to the town and surrounding islands. We had our picnic on top and headed down as the masses off a cruise ship started to flock up the hill, we had timed our ascent well

Back at the van at around 1:30 we headed east and out of Alesund, we were heading for Vestnes and the ferry over to Molde. The scenery around this area is very Scottish west coast, never too dramatic but a nice easy drive. We took the 661 road instead of the E136 for a wee change of scenery. We just missed the ferry at Vestnes so had to wait another 30 minutes to cross and by now it was raining quite hard. This ferry was expensive, 432NOK. At 5PM we drove through Molde and fuelled up, we didn't stop in Molde and continued a little bit further north to find a campsite. There was one at Bjolstad which Joyce fancied, and one at Tornes which I fancied as it said it was handy for fishing, so we passed the first and found ourselves in Tornes near a little marina. I rang the reception bell and the lady took our 250NOK and said just to park wherever we wanted, we chose to be right at the shore front for the great view, there were already a couple of vans there so we picked our spot and parked up. Gas gurned on and I unrolled the hook up cable, only to find that there were only 2 hook up points and they were full, so I went to our neighbours to ask if there were more? The guy was again German but spoke good English, so we both had a look about and could find no other, however one of the other vans which was already hooked up had a 4 way adaptor, so I had to chap on their door to ask if I could plug in, which was no problem and we were powered up.



I went back to our neighbour to say we were ok as he was still trying to locate another point, and introduced ourselves, their names were Bjorn, Ina and their big Bloodhound Fina (not sure about the spellings). As he had fishing rods out I asked him if he had been catching much, so we had a fair old blether, and then he said if I wanted to go out in the boat later he would take me, I had no boat fishing gear with me-only shore spinning gear, I explained that but that was no problem. I discussed this with Joyce, and she was fine with it, but I don't like to leave Joyce and the boys, and of course they wanted to play at the swings also, so after dinner I went to the play area for a wee while with them, I hadn't said yes to the fisher yet and I was dismayed to see him heading to his boat ready to go out and I wasn't, but I didn't want to hold him back. This niggled me for 5 minutes so I quickly nipped over to speak to him, he was just about to cast off on his boat, he had offered and I was keen so I asked if he could wait 15 minutes while I got ready, and also I didn't have any boat fishing gear, he said yes, he would wait and he also said he would look out another rod as his wife wasn't going out this evening so it was all systems go, he also got me kitted out with a lifejacket. So at 7pm we set out in a small boat, lol. It was cool though, Bjorn was clearly knowledgable and soon  we were out fishing and did not return till midnight-this is not a problem as its still vey light at that time. The tide was all wrong for fishing though, so we tried lots of different things with little success, we only caught a few small pollack and not much else, but its not about the catching, it just the being there and knowing that something (and possibly big) at any time could be caught. We tied the boat up, and decided to sit and have a beer and crack open a bottle of whisky, it was 3am before we decided to call it a day. We had, had a great time fishing as the sun went down and plenty of good chat during and after. A great end to another good day.