First 48 hours of farming

How do I sum up everything that has happened since I arrived at Anders´farm on Sunday evening?

Well, alright.. on Monday Anders took me on the boat to the remote island of Skorpa. It´s a small island that has a few old farmsteads on it, but people don´t really live out on those small islands anymore because they´re so isolated. Anders has an arrangement with a man who has a farm on Skorpa, and he left like 35 rams there since last year, as far as I can tell. Anyways, our job was to go there and round up the little rams and get them into these 4 metal crates by the seaside. The crates were to be picked up Tuesday morning by a big boat that delivers them to Førde to be slaughtered. Kind of a depressing job, really, because the rams are really sweet and small and beautiful and it´s hard to look them in the eye when you´re sending them to their doom, but such is life.

The other wwoofer volunteers were on the island already waiting for us - a newly married British couple named Pete & Ginny. Anders had dropped them off there the previous evening. Although Skorpa was remote and uninhabited, the man who owns the farmhouse there keeps it quite comfortable and homey inside so he can stay there over the summer.

We arrived Monday afternoon and checked to make sure we were all ready for the early morning ram-gathering. It was a beautiful warm night and the sea was calm, so we took the boat out and went fishing. I realize now that I´ve only ever fished with show-offs who never want to teach me anything, so it was incredibly awesome that I was offered my own fishing rod and Pete showed me some tricks of how to lure in the big fish. Of course him and Anders ended up catching quite a few each, and I only caught 1 (I almost had 2 others, but they were sneaky and leapt off the hook right as I was reeling them in).

The fishing was probably my favorite thing I´ve done so far. We had such a fun time and were very excited about all the fish we were catching, and it was so amazing to be there on that gorgeous sea near an isolated island with some old Viking rams living there, just as the sun was setting over the water. I´ve never experienced anything quite like it. The guys were really invigorated by our thrilling catch, and wanted to keep going. So they hauled the old wooden crab traps out of the barn, filling them with heavy stones to sink them, and fish heads and innards to lure in the crabs.

We ate some sausages for dinner and went to bed early. I had a little bunk bed and my sleeping bag, so it was perfectly cozy. The weather´s been good - like 50-60 degrees I think.
Woke up at 6am because we couldn´t be sure when the boat was coming, and we needed to be ready in time. We drank coffee and ate cheese & pepperoni sandwiches (Norwegian pepperoni.. not really pepperoni but some kind of little round cured delicious meat slices). I was just putting on my wellies when I heard Anders outside saying "The sheep are gone!". Ginny and I looked at each other terrified and ran out after him, and sure enough the rams had found the weakest part of their fence and collectively trampled it, and they were nowhere to be seen. After some frantic rock scrambling, we found them and shooed them back into another pen. Kind of a dramatic start though.

I may be too lazy to explain the whole process of catching the rams and putting them into a wheelbarrow and carting them over to the dock and flipping them into the crates.. but that´s essentially what happened. I manned the wheelbarrow a good bit of the time, but I also took a bunch of photos. Hilde is writing a book about sheep and doesn´t have any documentation of this procedure, so my photography was justified, which was awesome! It also means I have a crapload of sheep-wrangling photos up on Flickr too which you should definitely check out.
Anyways, after all 30 rams were safely locked in, we tagged their horns with the appropriate strips ("return skin to owner" & "certified organic"). Then we drank more coffee and waited for the boat to arrive. Can I just say as an aside: I am so lucky that I´m staying with a coffee-loving farmer? Anders makes time for a lot of coffee breaks, and I´m so appreciative of them!

So yeah, next the boat came with a huge crane attached to it and Anders & Pete wrapped these massive chains around each crate and the crane scooped them up and the whole process took like under 5 minutes, which was crazy after the amount of time the preparation took! And by now, someone could already be enjoying some tasty meat, I suppose... what a morbid thought, hmn?
At this point, our work was pretty much done. So we checked our crab traps, and happily found that we had caught 6 of them!! That was awesome news, especially since we also had like 6 mackerel and some other yellow fish called lyr.
Seafood extravaganza!

We took the boat back to Hilde´s farm, stopping at yet another tiny island on the way to drop off 1 ram who´d been chosen for breeding at the last moment (and therefore spared his life, lucky guy!). I´m currently not doing a very good job at forming sentances, so now I´m just trying to get the content out there and screw form.

Back at Hilde´s island by about 2pm, after a glorious lunch of coffee and open faced sandwiches (for realz!), I was sent on a mission to get the mail across the island. It was quite a nice walk, since there are no cars and only 1 other inhabitant (a crazy old man named Alfred).

When I got back, everyone had gone their seperate ways, so I lay on the couch and wrote in my journal as the rain started to fall outside.
A moment later, a soggy Pete & Ginny ran in and asked if I wouldn´t mind helping them with a rescue mission. They had found a sick lamb on the other side of the island (way further than the mailbox) and couldn´t carry it all the way back on foot. So we got in the dingy and motored over, and what had been a slight drizzle turned into legit rain, which was unpleasant to say the least.
Pete deposited Ginny & I on a slippery rock, and we trekked over to the tree that they´d tethered the poor lamb to. We half dragged, half carried him back to the boat. Not an easy task. He was NOT feeling it. When we got back to Hilde´s dock, Pete had to drive the tractor down to get us - the road up to the house and barn is extremely steep and gravely, and there´s no way we could drag a resisting lamb up there. So G and I had to climb into the wet muddy backhoe with this depressed lamb, and crouch there as we bumped up along this steep road. In the rain.
Overall a thoroughly miserable experience, but come on - I helped save a sick lamb! He was all alone, pretty much destined to die out in the wilderness. And now a vet is coming to see him, and he might be okay!

Hilde and Anders fried up our freshly caught mackerel and it was DELICIOUS of course, and then Anders and I had to go back on the boat to pick up his daughter Britta from swim class and finally.. back home. After all those adventures, it really did feel like coming home, which was refreshing to realize. I´m very glad my homebase here is so wonderfully cozy.

More adventures to come. That was a fair amount for 2 days though, right?