This evening the three of us decided to go for a walk out to an island that can only be reached at low tide. A check of the tide tables yesterday evening indicated that low tide would be just before 8 pm. So we took off from home at 7 pm.
We chose to park near the recycling center in Utøy, which serves the whole municipality of Inderøy.
The recycling center for Inderøy municipality had just closed when we got there. There is parking off to the left for those who want to go for a walk. There is a ramp up to the upper level, so that garbage is thrown into the big blue bins from the top. Examples of what we would sort out is cardboard, metal and impregnated wood. The red bins to the left are for clothing. They are in the open area so accessible at all times for depositing used clothing.
We had about a one and a half kilometer walk to where we wanted to go, mostly downhill, through both open forest that had been recently logged and older forest.
This section of the walk was through old forest. It was cool and pleasant in the forest.We are almost down to sea level and we are going to walk out that causeway to Storholmen, the island you can see in this picture.. This is about as low as the tide goes. It was registered at 47 cm at 19:50 today, the 10th of August 2021.To the right of Storholmen is Kvamsholman, which is really two islands. These two islands are a habitat management area and are reserved for birds, in particular oyster catchers (tjeld), eider ducks (ærfugl) and two types of sea gulls.This information sign of the islands shows how Storholmen has a causeway out to it and Kvamsholmen is reserved for the birds. All the islands are isolated at high tide. The difference between high tide and low tide can be as much as three meters.The path out to Storholmen is easy to follow, though there is quite a bit of seaweed on either side. Some of the seaweed was quite slippery if you stepped on it. It was about 600 meters from the beach out to the island.I’m no expert on seaweed, so I can’t tell you what kind this is.A different kind of seaweed.In some places there were a lot of mussels as well. They would make good food for the sea birds that live here.Storholmen is a large rock in the fjord and is covered by a variety of vegetation, including trees and grasses.StorholmenKvamsholman as seen from Storholmen. Kvamsholman is about 200 meters from Storholmen.
We enjoyed our walk. The temperature was about 20 degrees Celsius, though it felt more when we were walking in the sun. We walked about 2 km each way and we walked the same route back to the car. The return to the car was a bit more strenuous as we now had to climb back up the hill. We were probably walking for about one hour. this is a walk that we take about once a year.
