Today I made the first tiny forest trip after I moved one and half week ago. It was so nice being out on a little expedition again. Not far from where I live is the remnants of an Atlantikwall fortification, the Heeres Küsten Batterie  20/972 Ansnes, which sorted under Atilleriegruppe Senja. The position was equipped with four 10,5 cm guns of the type K332(f) with a range of 12000 m. The fort was operational by june 1942. 
It had rained hard all yesterday and all night but by lunchtime today it cleared up and it soon was a decent summers temperature and all blue sky. I found my camera and forest clothes and drove along the fjord until I found a place to park near the site.  I followed a small trail and soon spotted the first pieces of concrete. It looked like a small bunker but sadly the entrance was filled up and blocked by old farming equipment and rubbish. The little trail led me to an opening in the mountainside and ofcourse I hadn`t brought a strong torch, but with the help of the flash on the camera and the little flashlight on my phone I managed to stumble through the rather short tunnels. It ended in a stairway leading out to the forest and a position in the end of a narrow ravine.
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 Back out in the forest I found position after position, ammo- and personell shelters , trenches and cable ditches all over the place, and tons of wires and barbed wires. A few of the bunkers I found between the greenery was possible to enter, although one have to be careful. I crawled into a observation post and there the wooden cover in the roof was still intact but the floors were full of large rocks and some garbage. A bit further away I found what I think was one of the gun emplacements with a ammo or personell shelter in rather good condition. 
As I was going to pick up Girlfriend from the busstop I had to cut it short but I spent a few minutes checking out the kommandobunker before I left and it looked very kool, but I couldn`t find a way into it, the two openings I found had no ladders and it was pretty far down so I am not sure I d be able to get out again. I will visit this place again a bit later into the autumn when it is less vegetation to take more pics, and also to check out a cluster of bunkers on the oposite side of the road down by the shores. (Edit) : I was back here a few days ago and found the entrance to the Kommandobunker and made some pics and video from the insides, you ll find them below. 

On the old cemetery on the main island in Tromsø you can find the northernmost British war graves from WW2 in the world. Most of the British buried here gave their lives in the convoy traffic over to Murmansk, and most of them died when S.S Cumleigh was bombed outside Svalbard in November 1942.
I visited the site today and made a pic of each grave and you can see them in the slideshow below.
​R.I.P.

After a few days of putting stuff in boxes , carefully packing relics and dioramas so they ll be safe to move I had to take a break and get out to the forests. Yesterday and most of the night it rained pretty heavily but a few hours of morning sun seemed to have dried up the  forest quite well. I had went to one of the Gebirgsjäger capitulation sites with fresh batteries in the Fisher and the Garrett. The site had during the war been for Heer soldiers working in connection with the POWs slaving away constructing the railroad, but in the end of the war used as a camp for Gebirgsjägers having fought on the Northern front in Karelia . There is a few long stretches here where it is signals everywhere, I think it is where they had kept the horses, coz most of the metal I ve dug up there is horse related, also meters and meters of wires, with the occasional nice find inbetween. Today I went further into the forest where the barracks stood and their foundations can still be seen and barrack ovens scatter the place. I ve dug a few interesting things here before but after a couple of hours searching today it seemed luck wasn`t with me. I had found some tunic buttons, a few bits from horse drawn carriages, some Mauser casings, one stirrup from a saddle and a part for a karbid lantern.
 I had moved to the edge of the camp by the river and turned around to get back into the forest. The detector shouted out a good signal and first I thought I had the barrell of a cannon, but unfortunately it was something else,a mystery part (pic further down), it wasn`t really much rusted so I chucked it in the bag to bring it home and find out what it is. I pushed myself through some bushes, got my foot tangled up and fell. I sort of regained balance sticking the detector in front of me and when the coil hit the ground I heard a nice signal. As I removed the moss I was for a moment puzzled when I saw black bakelite. I cleared the item from roots and soil and saw it was a casing for binoculars. I carefully got it loose and felt it was heavy. I didn`t dare hope it was anything else than soil or mud inside it, clearly remembering the time I found a heavy MG ammo box, which turned out to be filled with karbid. I managed to open the lid of the case without destroying the lock too much. The binoculars was there!! And it looked like they was in rather good condition too! Wow, this I had not expected, and just goes to prove what a fantastic hobby this is,,one never knows what will be next. Even though I had been very careful the lid broke off when I tried to close it again. Will see when it is cleaned up if it is possible to repair it.
I searched around to see if it was anything else good laying near,and I got lots of strong nice signals. All of them was pieces of some thick wire.  I spent another couple of hours searching and found a K98 stripper clip, a canteen knife, some mystery bits, horseshoes and a small dumping pits filled with food tins and the last signal I dug today was a toothpaste tube thrown away by a German soldier 75 years ago. 
I ll try make it out for another little stroll tomorrow I think. 
​Keep Smiling:)

Back home it was nice to relax in the sun with a beer and a new comic.

The clouds hung low today but it was nice and warm and I had a ditch to dig so I got up early and found my way to the forest. I really should spend the day packing stuff for the move, but I just couldn`t stay indoors, I ve been digging too little so far this season as it is. My plan was to search through another one of the ditches I located before winter so I turned on the Fisher F5, ground balanced it, and went to work. A few meter of walking and it gave a nice and clear signal that had to be investigated. As I got the pin pointer out and swiped it across the little pile of sand I had dug out I saw the corner of the metal bit. It had a small hole in the corner and that gave it away, I knew it was a POW ID tag. I brushed away the sand and found it was just half a tag, but nice and readable. The guy who had worn it probably broke it in half and threw the pieces away sometime around his liberation in 1945, so I gave the surroundings a good search but didn`t manage to find the other piece,,heck,maybe I found it last year or some of the years before that, I need to check my piles for a match.
The dumping ditch was opened and searched but there was no interesting item at all, only rusted tins and barrell bands. I found two other relatively small pits and the same result there. A fourth short ditch gave off interesting signals, but those were some large bits off an oven, and the only "keepable" bit was a tunic button and a Losantine bakelite box.
Walking back to the car I found a pick axe and a big lock from maybe one of the POW barracks, or a shed.
The next two days will be spent at work and at home packing but on Sunday I hope to drag myself away and back into the ants and mosqitoes  territories.
​

This morning I woke up early by the sun shining on my face, one of the rare times I am awake before the cats and get to wake them up for a change. I had decided last evening to spend the day searching and digging but first I had to pack and ship a bunch of parcels to customers and I spent a few minutes making a leash for my pinpointer. I took an old telephone cable and attached it to the pinpointer and in the other end i made a loop and attached a hook. Never again will I drop it in the forest floor, bury it or leave it behind.
With that done I drove to a forest where it was a Heer camp, a small POW camp and in the end of the war the entire area was used as a filtration camp for German soldiers. Before winter I had located a couple of dumping ditches and today I walked straight to it and opened it up. 

In the top of the ditch was a bit of barbed wire and broken glass but soon more intact items started to pop out. The kitchen must had been close by coz most of the things was food related. A bunch of spoons and a few forks, several enamel food bowls and five or six mess kits, I`m not sure yet if they are German, Russian or prehaps Norwegian mess kits. I also found six Red Army soldiers enamelled drinking cups in good condition and at least as many rotted ones. One broken German porcelain coffe cup was on the bottom of the pit. I had also found a nice beer bottle, one POW wooden clog and a bent matchbox cover.
It had become very warm by the time I filled back the ditch but I went for a stroll searching for any signals to dig, I didn`t pick up anything but some pieces from an oven and a food tin or two. The last signal I dug was a small fireplace with a few intact food tins and a small medic bottle.
I hope to be back out searching one of the next days, then I ll probably dig one of the other dumping pits already located:)

...and drinking cup.

Sunday brought a hint of summer so I gathered my digging tools and went out for a legstretcher. I went to a well visited Heer and Org.Todt camp where I ve been searching for years. There is at least two ditches I ve not searched all through yet and probably lots more scattered around the forests to be found. I plan to stroll around digging signals from the Fisher for a while and slowly move towards one of the unfinished ditches. 
It is so wonderful walking into a forest where you can`t hear traffic and you can smell so many things, fresh air, tree saps, the damp forest floor, ant pee, very strong, intense smell of ant pee. I had kneeled down to check a signal in the middle of Ant Highway, a mistake I ve done more than once, and it took a bit of jumping around to get rid of the angriest of them. The signal I  had been checking was a fallen and overgrown barbed wire fence. The next hour all I found was two shovel blades, so I took direction of the ditch.
I had to hack my way through a huge stinging nettle shrubland and them bastards got my face, stung through my gloves and some even burrowed their way through my trousers and got to my legs and knees. Great fun! I found the ditch and kept digging there the rest of the afternoon. The ground was full, it was barely any room for soil between all the food tins and bottles, broken and a whole bunch of intact ones. It was a handful of items between it all worth saving, a pocket knife, a MG rubber muzzle cap,k98 oilers, some smaller bottles, Nivea and perfume ones and a couple of signal flares. under a zink bucket that was upside down it was a couple of food tins with the paper lables still on, but they turned to dust by the breath, and the find of the day a German helmet liner. 
I hope to make a trip back there one of the next days and maybe if I am lucky I ll find the helmet then :)

In June I almost got no digging done. I was in Latvia the first two weeks and had a great time there, and while I was there Girlfriend got a job. So when I got back from Latvia most of the time was spent trying to find a house we could rent. We were incredibly lucky as the market for apartments and houses is not the best, things are overpriced and there is few units for rent. We contacted the few we found that would suit us and went to have a look at a farm outside the city she ll work in. During our visit there the houseowner decided he liked us and we got to rent it from him.!! Since then most my time have been spent trying to sort out things to throw away and pack what Im going to bring with me.
A few times I found time to go searching, and since we ll be away for at least 3 years I had to check out some places I never searched before. 
Mainly I searched a large forest an old farmer told me the Germans dumped a lot of stuff in. I spent three or four afternoons there but so far I haven`t located the place, I ll ask if he can show me the exact spot.
I also checked out two other forests where the Germans had camps, but both places seemed to be rather empty, not much to find at all. I will ofcourse go back to both of them at some point in the future, there must be some ditches full of rubbish there.
Below is some pics from these trips :)

Today it was exellent weather, a rare +25 degree Celsius and not a cloud in sight, it was a light breeze so it was no time to waste sitting in the sofa. We drove to the old Gebirgsjäger capitulation site and ended up spending a good few hours there. A storm in December had torn down lots of the trees so the area was almost unrecognisable. We didn`t find much interesting things, but a small patch between some trees and bushes gave lots of nice signals. Spread around was several buttons from a German uniform and a Zeltbahn, some coins and we also found a couple of game pieces from the small games soldiers could get, like chess or backgammon. We also found a "spork", but Im not sure it is German it looks shorter than all the others I ve found.
Further up in the forest near the river we had a massive signal and it was a large object just below the grass but going deeper underground. After some exhausting digging half the item was visible but it was still impossible to get it out from the ground, prehaps because of all the rocks around it or the bottom part of it might still be caught by the ice which goes deep into ground during winter. It might be some kind of oven, or maybe a cabinet. We ll go back in a few days with new energy and when the sun has tawed the ground a bit more and find out whats down there.

Not a second too late spring finally did arrive. It is earlier than the last two years but later than 2015 when I began digging April 14th. It is anyway warm and nice here north now and my favorite relic hunting spot is free for snow and ice. Me and Girlfriend strolled to the Gasmask mountain around lunchtime today and got stuck searching and digging there for hours. The first thing we noticed when we arrived was that someone had been here before us, probably before snowfall last season, and they had made a mess. Instead of refilling their holes they had just thrown all the rust and broken glass around. It didn`t look very nice at all but lucky for me they had left a large pile of the lovely orange Losantine bottles and some nice intact MG drum magazines. 
I spent some time going through the thrown around rust and picked out a few more nice bits and while doing that I heard the breathing sound from the Harbour Porpoises and we were so lucky to get to see 5 of them swimming around close to the shore. 
One of the holes the other diggers had left open looked to still be full of relics so I found the shovel and dug it for a couple of hours. I found lots more Losantine, some MG bolt bodies  magazines and gasmask bits. A few nice medical bottles and bakelite k98 oilers went into the bag and I got a couple of "mystery" bits as well which will be fun to try find what is. Soon both the backpacks I had brought had been filled with goodies and we had grown hungry so we went back home, but I ve had a long winter so tomorrow the day will be spent out there.
It was good to smell the fresh soil again:)

Yesterday morning the world was covered in a few cm thick layer of snow, but the temperature was mild enough to take the detector out for a last stroll. I wanted to check out a forest to see if it might be a place to begin the next season in a few months. After a little stroll and a bit of a climb and a struggle through some shrubbery we reached the forest where it 75 years ago had been some German activity. The forest was wet from the snow so we were soaked even before getting to turn on the detector. We immediately saw rust scattered around the trees. Barrack stoves, buckets, roof sheeting and car tires littered the site. The Fisher gave off good and interesting signals quite often. I only dug two or three signals and they were all food tins, but it looks good for next season for sure. Between a few large pines relics peeked out from the moss. Bottles, metal and porcelain on the surface hints of a large dumping site and a bit further away we could spot a large soup kettle from the camp kitchen. The weather changed rapidly between partly blue and sunny to dark grey with heavy snow, it was very fascinating really. After a few hours strolling around the forest we decided enough was enough and found our way back to the car and headed back home to dry clothes and warm ovens.
Before we got home we drove a little extra and made a stop by a couple of Soviet POW memorials standing by some cabins to make some pics and pay our respects to the memory of the Red Army soldiers who suffered and died in one of the many POW camps that once filled the valley.