Eidesvik Brand Guidelines: A 1965 Bømlo Fishing Start, Viking Ships & LNG Supply Vessels

A Bømlo family business that went to sea in 1965.

Eidesvik comes from Bømlo, an island municipality on the Norwegian west coast between Haugesund and Bergen. The company says it was founded at Langevåg, in the south of the island, in 1965, and that it started in fisheries before entering the offshore industry in the 1970s. English Wikipedia’s article on the shipowner Kristian Eidesvik, citing the business magazine Kapital, dates his business career to 1965, when he and his brother invested in a fishing vessel; Norwegian Wikipedia names the brother as Lauritz Eidesvik and says the two ran a fishing-boat company together.

The brothers kept investing, in shipping, offshore and other industries, English Wikipedia says, and in 1997 they split their company, with Kristian taking over the short-sea shipping company Wilson and other assets. The offshore business kept the family name. A company history, Spennande utfordringar: Om rederiet Eidesvik fra Bømlo by Kristian Bredesen, was published in 1999, according to Norwegian Wikipedia.

Today the listed company is Eidesvik Offshore ASA, traded on Oslo Børs under the ticker EIOF. Its head office is still on Bømlo, and Norway’s national encyclopedia, Store norske leksikon, names it among the larger companies in the municipality, alongside the Wärtsilä works on the island that makes gears and controllable-pitch propellers.

Supply ships, subsea vessels and the Viking names.

Eidesvik describes three lines of work. Its platform supply vessels carry cargo between onshore bases and offshore oilfields, and the company says several of them also meet the requirements for standby and oil-recovery work under the rules of NOFO, the Norwegian clean-seas association for operating companies. Its subsea vessels handle construction, module handling and inspection, maintenance and repair (IMR) of subsea installations, including work with remotely operated underwater vehicles. A third line serves the construction, commissioning and maintenance of offshore wind farms.

The names make the fleet easy to spot. English Wikipedia says most of the company’s ships have names beginning with “Viking” and describes them as orange. The fleet list on the company website in November 2026 includes the supply vessels Viking Princess, Viking Prince, Viking Lady, Viking Energy, Viking Avant and Viking Queen, the wind vessel Viking Wind Power and the subsea vessels Seven Viking and Viking Subsea, with four more ships under management: Viking Neptun, Cecon Vigor, NS Orla and NS Frayja. The mix has changed over time. English Wikipedia describes a fleet that also included seismic vessels and a cable-laying ship alongside its supply and subsea vessels; the 2026 fleet list groups the ships only as supply, subsea and wind. In October 2026 Eidesvik announced that a joint company had completed the sale of the IMR vessel Viking Reach; Offshore Energy reported in August 2026 that the joint venture was 50.1 per cent owned by Eidesvik and 49.9 per cent by Reach Subsea, and that the 85-metre vessel had been built in 2009 and bought, as Edda Sun, in early 2023.

New ships are on order. MarineLink reported in February 2025 that Eidesvik, Agalas and Reach Subsea had ordered a construction support vessel from the Sefine Shipyard in Turkey, designed by NSK Ship Design, 99.9 metres long and due in spring 2027, with a battery hybrid system and generator sets able to run on methanol or marine gas oil; Eidesvik already had a similar vessel under construction there with Agalas. The company’s fleet page lists that earlier ship, Viking Vigor, with an estimated delivery in the third quarter of 2026.

How offshore support vessel operators present themselves.

Offshore support vessel operators sell a service rather than a product, so their public face is the fleet itself. Their websites lead with photographs of platform supply vessels, anchor-handling tugs, fast crew boats and liftboats as the companies publish them, usually at sea or alongside a quay, with the working deck and the bridge in view.

Behind those photographs sits the fleet list. Operators sort their vessels by type, from supply vessels and anchor handlers to crew boats, liftboats and specialist ships, and give each class a short description, a named example and a length or deck size. Vessel names often run in families, such as a shared prefix, a family surname or a set of animal or place names, and those naming habits become part of how an operator is recognised in port and on charter lists.

Colour plays a similar role. Hull paint, superstructure colour and the mark on the funnel or the side of the bridge are what people see first from a distance, and many operators repeat the same few colours across a whole fleet. In this guide those colours are described in plain words rather than copied, and the palettes shown are our own interpretation.

The rest of an operator’s identity lives in plainer pages: contract and charter news, regional contact lists, sustainability reports and, for listed companies, investor pages with results and presentations. Ownership in the sector has changed often through mergers, restructurings and sales, so each guide sets out who owns the company today, what it says about its fleet, and which facts come from the company and which from independent reports.

LNG, batteries and a planned ammonia conversion.

Eidesvik presents itself above all through the fuels and power systems on its ships. The company says plans for running a platform supply vessel on liquefied natural gas began in 2000, and that the Viking Energy, delivered in 2003, made it the first to use LNG as fuel for offshore vessels; the engine maker Wärtsilä repeated that description in a 2024 press release. The company also says it tested fuel cells at full scale on the Viking Lady between 2006 and 2012, added battery hybrid systems to the Viking Queen in 2015 and the Viking Princess in 2017, and converted the construction vessel Seven Viking to battery hybrid propulsion in 2019. In 2016, it says, the Viking Energy received a “Battery Power” class notation for its battery system, which Wärtsilä’s 2024 release also mentions.

The next step was announced in August 2024. Wärtsilä said it had signed a contract to supply the engine, fuel gas supply system and exhaust after-treatment to convert the Viking Energy, then on contract to Equinor, to run on ammonia, with Equinor contributing financing. The ship entered dock for the conversion in May 2026.

Chief executive Helga Cotgrove described the Viking Reach sale as fitting a focus on fleet renewal, Offshore Energy reported in August 2026, and the Turkish newbuild as part of a growth strategy, MarineLink reported in February 2025. The company’s home page sets out the aim of being “a powerhouse for future oriented shipping and operational solutions.”

For a design guide, Eidesvik shows how a family name, one repeated ship prefix and a hull colour that English Wikipedia describes as orange can carry a fleet’s identity from fishing boats to subsea and wind vessels. Compare Island Offshore, another west-coast Norwegian owner whose ships all share one name, and REM Offshore. For this guide we use an orange, a rust and a slate with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Eidesvik’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.