Oksnøen Summer Camp, Lake Vansjø

The programme is one summer camp, run in periods, with two age camps: a junior camp for children from the year they turn eight up to and including fourteen, and a senior camp for those who turn fifteen and sixteen during the year. There are no lessons. Each day holds two activity sessions and a varying evening activity, and within a session participants choose freely which activity to join; organised activities always run with a leader present. Between sessions the camp area is open — football pitch, beach-volleyball court, table tennis, basketball hoop, trampoline and animals to feed and pet.

A period covers the stay in a cabin, all meals in the common dining hall and the activities run by the camp leaders, including the boats and equipment used in them. Life vests are provided for everyone on the water; participants may bring their own. The camp kiosk, Gomla, opens on a few evenings during a period: each camper gets a gift-card number with a limit that parents set at booking, and what has been spent is invoiced afterwards, together with the camp sweater for those who bought one. Bedding is not provided — a sleeping bag or duvet with a cover, a sheet and a pillow with a case are brought from home.

Participants sleep in wooden cabins of one to nine rooms, with three to ten people per room depending on the size of the cabin and the room. Girls and boys sleep in separate cabins, and sanitary blocks are separate for girls and boys, with showers in individual cubicles. Campers share a room with others their own age and, as far as the number of beds allows, with those they ask to stay with. Each leader has cabin responsibility: they look after everyone living in their cabin and are the person a camper can always come to. The camp is divided into three age groups, which go to bed at different times; a camper who wants or needs to sleep earlier always may.

All meals are taken together in the common dining hall — breakfast in the morning, dinner in the middle of the day and an evening meal — and fruit and water are available between meals. Allergies and special diets, including gluten-free, lactose-free, halal and vegetarian, are catered for; they are stated at booking under “other information”, and on arrival parents should make sure the period’s welfare leader, the Nurse, has what is needed.

On the water: sailing in an A-jolle dinghy that takes two or three people, canoe, kayak and SUP boards from the camp beach, water-skiing and wakeboarding behind the ski boat, and the tube boat from the main jetty with sofa, banana and single-rider tubes. After a motorboat course run by a leader, campers may drive the camp’s small motorboats themselves. Fishing trips go out in all weather, trolling behind the boat or anchored in a bay, and rods can be borrowed. A short boat ride away a zip line is rigged across a narrow sound, ending in the water, and at Slottsholmen campers jump from cliffs of two, three, five, eight and — for the boldest — thirteen metres. On land the camp area is open for football, beach volleyball, table tennis, basketball and the trampoline.

The camp occupies its own island in Lake Vansjø: rocky shores, cliffs and forest, a beach with sailing and paddling equipment, a main jetty and a motorboat jetty. On shore there are a football pitch, a beach-volleyball court, table tennis, a basketball hoop, a trampoline and animals that are fed and petted, together with several open common areas for games and rest. Meals are served in the common dining hall; sanitary blocks for girls and boys are separate, with showers in individual cubicles. The period leaders keep their office, Snoopy, open to campers with questions, and the camp kiosk Gomla opens on a few evenings in a period.

Oksnøen is a family business, run by a managing director and an operations manager, and the weekly leader team is around thirty people aged seventeen to twenty-eight, most of whom spent several summers on the island as campers themselves. Everyone working at the camp holds current safety certificates and the certificates required to work with children and young people and to run the activities offered. The period leaders are known as the Prime Minister and the Assistant, in keeping with the camp’s idea of itself as a small kingdom with its own flag, passport, law and government. A welfare leader, the Nurse, makes sure campers who take medicines get them at fixed times, deals with small injuries, contacts the out-of-hours doctor and the family when something bigger happens, and comforts anyone who is homesick. The camp is mobile-free, and the staff treat that as part of what makes the week work.