Fedje Vessel Traffic Service Centre

Its main responsibility is handling traffic headed to the offshore bases and refineries at Sture and Mongstad.

In early times pilots had a competitive regime, where several candidates would race to reach a potential ship to collect the fee.

Because of the hard competition, pilots would often fare out in too harsh conditions, frequently meeting an early death.

Fedje is located along the main sea lane from the north to Bergen and therefore has been an important base for pilots.

This dramatically changed during the First World War, when series of British convoys traveled up and down the coast.

[2] During the war the Luftwaffe installed a radar mast at Hesthaugen, on the current site of the center.

[4] The need for a vessel traffic service arose with the construction of the bases and refineries at Mongstad and Sture.

This included construction of three radars, one on Fedje, one at Vikingneset on the Gulen island of Byrknesøyna, and one on Marøy.

[8] Fedje VTS cost 31 million Norwegian krone and was funded entirely by the operators of the bases, Statoil and Norsk Hydro.

[9] Starting in September 1994 a trial service for using helicopters to fly the pilots to larger ships was introduced.

In 2002 the Coastal Administration carried out a centralization of the dispatching and relocated it to the newly established Kvitsøy Vessel Traffic Service Centre.

[12] A major accident took place within the jurisdiction of the center on 12 January 2007, when the Cypriot cargo vessel MV Server went aground on the south side of Fedje.

[20] The VTS is financed through fees charged on the heavy shipping traffic which creates the need for the center.

[23] The center can draw on data from the Automatic Identification System, local radar, meteorology, SafeSeaNet and video cameras.

It covers the busiest area in Norway, with about 9,000 annual missions, or twenty percent of the national figures.