by Jim Wellman
The Fish Lady of Lewisporte, Newfoundland:
Marilyn Kinden
Marilyn Kinden shows off a lobster in her store.
If you worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week for most of the year, you would know a little bit about what it’s like to be Marilyn Kinden.
Known to many as the “Fish Lady,” Marilyn and her husband, Everett, run a busy retail fish business called Treats from the Sea. Based near Lewisporte on Newfoundland’s northeast coast, the family business started in the mid-1980s when Everett bought lobsters from a local fisherman and sold them from the back of his pickup truck.
Treats from the Sea
The idea was to pick up a few dollars pocket money. Today, the couple has grown the business to go beyond fish, and they have included several other family members along with several non-family employees.
Driving east from Lewisporte on the Road to the Isles toward Twillingate, you can’t miss their lobster pound and retail outlet. A huge twenty-six-foot lobster sitting on the north side of the highway just in front of the store is more than enough to catch your attention.
The 12,000-pound-capacity holding tanks inside the building are also likely to garner a second glance, not to mention the bright red fish and chips van situated a hundred feet to the left of the store.
Government regulations no longer allow the Kindens to purchase lobsters directly from fishermen, but they only buy locally caught lobsters and purchase far more than one pickup load at a time these days.
While lobster is still one of their main products, Marilyn and Everett have expanded the business to include fresh crab, cod (salted as well as fresh), mackerel, salmon, caplin, kippers, seal flippers (in season), shrimp, and many other species—including mussels supplied by Terry Mills, owner of Norlantic Mussels Farms in nearby Botwood.
Marilyn realized that the Road to the Isles had a limited customer base, so she decided to go mobile with Treats from the Sea. Four days a week she fills a large cube van with fish and drives to Gander, Grand Falls, and Botwood, where she sells directly from the truck. She operates the van from April until just after Labour Day and comes back again for a couple of weeks in December, when people like to stock up on fish supplies for the winter.
Marilyn Kinden is a high-energy and outgoing person who thrives on interacting with people. In other words, she’s perfect for her job.
Her customers cross the demographic spectrum, and that’s the way she likes it. One minute she’s chatting with a young mom and the next minute she’s joking with a retired judge. They’re all the same to Marilyn.
Several years ago, she had a customer who was very difficult to deal with. He was demanding beyond reason and at times was downright rude. Trying her best to honour the age-old maxim that the customer was always right, Marilyn bit her tongue and said nothing. But Marilyn Kinden can’t be silent for too long, and something had to give.
One day, the customer was being particularly difficult.
“He was buying a salmon, and every one I took out of the box was too big, too small, not the right colour, it was too slimy or too something—there was no way of pleasing him, and he was also rude,” she explains.
That was the moment Marilyn decided that maintaining her sanity was more important than losing a customer, and Mr. Rude and Impossible got an earful that he never forgot. Interestingly, he continued to be a customer for years later—without a single murmur of discontent.
In 2011, Everett and Marilyn brought their daughter, Chelsea, into their business and set up a fish and chips van next to the lobster pound. Chelsea’s Fish and Chips is just part of the Kindens’ many expansion plans for their Road to the Isles business.
Among other things, Marilyn talks excitedly about building a docking facility nearby to accommodate the busy boat traffic in Notre Dame Bay. Lewisporte is home to a large fleet of both powerboats and sailboats. Several inshore fishing vessels also frequent the area.
Giant lobster model outside the Treats from the Sea store
Five years ago, Marilyn decided to start fundraising for charity. Many of her customers said they liked to cook lobster in salt water and asked if they could have some from the pound to take home with them. Of course she obliged, but she had an idea. Marilyn realized that people don’t expect something for nothing, so she gave people an option of making a contribution to a charity in return for a bag of salt water. She placed a donation container in the area where people could voluntarily drop a loonie or toonie, and at the end of the season Marilyn donates the contributions to her charity of choice. This past year she raised $2,060 for the Children’s Wish Foundation (Lewisporte Chapter). Other charities she has helped include the Shriners, SPCA, Janeway Children’s Hospital, and Daffodil Place.
Marilyn says they’ve managed to keep their fish prices at nearly the same level for the past eight years. Inflationary costs have been absorbed through increased volume. She also boasts prices lower than supermarkets for fish. In some cases, she says, her prices are substantially lower.
Marilyn has advertised, but the popularity of the business has largely been through word of mouth. She loves to tell the story about a cab driver from New York who visited for a week and had supper every evening at their facility. Marilyn says the cabbie was chatting with a customer in New York one day when the customer mentioned that he had recently returned from Newfoundland. The driver was intrigued because, coincidentally, he and his wife had booked a vacation to Newfoundland for the summer of 2012, so he had a lot of questions.
“Well, the guy told the cab driver that if he went to Central (Newfoundland) he must look up this fish shop. Sure enough, the cabbie did look us up, and every evening for a week he and his wife stopped by for supper before going back to their hotel in Lewisporte,” Marilyn laughs.
When the fishing season ends, Marilyn and Everett, along with their son Chad, turn their attention to a whole different business—one that started even smaller than the fish business.
Years ago, when Everett would cut a Christmas tree for their home, he’d get another two or three for a neighbour or family member or an elderly family. The requests from other friends and neighbours increased, so one day Everett thought that cutting Christmas trees for sale might be another way to pick up a few dollars.
Marilyn says while most people think that growing a tree and selling it for $40 is easy money, reality is a different matter.
“For starters, it takes about nine years to grow a tree, and when you factor in fertilizer costs, herbicides, vehicle and fuel costs and salaries, there is not a very wide margin of profit.”
They’ve leased fifty acres of Crown land but so far have not developed all of it.
And still there is more. Everett also owns an outfitting business near Millertown in Central Newfoundland.
Kinden’s Quinn Lake Outfitters has a drive-in hunting and fishing camp that includes a Red Seal Chef.
Marilyn has a role in that business as well but, to most Newfoundlanders, Marilyn Kinden remains “The Fish Lady of Lewisporte.”
The Lobster Lady of Lorneville, New Brunswick:
Karen McCavour
Karen McCavour working the lobster boilers
People say nice things about Karen McCavour from Lorneville, New Brunswick.
Many say she has a kind heart. And she does, but years ago, when Karen was just five years old, her heart was generous but it was not healthy. She’s fine now, but she needed surgery to correct the problem. Years later, when her son Bronson was born, Karen was devastated when doctors told her that he also had a heart defect. However, it was not related to the heart problem she had as a child. Happily, too, Bronson, like his mom, is doing just fine and he’s a very active and normal sixteen-year-old.
Karen the outdoorswoman and hunter
Now in her forties, Kare
n is giving back to the hospital that conducted her and Bronson’s surgeries, and she’s doing so in a big way. I’ll tell you more about that on another page, but for now let me introduce you to her.
Karen Vickers McCavour has always been the outdoorsy, hands-on type.
In her high school days, Karen decided to take advantage of the industrial programs that were available through the school system and took a welding course. She became the first female in New Brunswick to earn two welding certificates. She’s also an avid big-game hunter and knows her way around a fishing boat, too.
But these days Karen leaves the boat work to her husband, Captain Kenny McCavour, and she takes care of a new and flourishing fish business located on their home property in Lorneville, on the outskirts of Saint John.
Karen and Sue Roach, ready to cook
A few years ago, the price of lobster dropped dramatically and, like all his peers, Kenny was finding it tough to make a decent living. Karen was a stay-at-home mom, so she decided to try and make a few dollars on the side and started cooking lobster to sell from her home. In the beginning, her customers were scarcely more than a few neighbours and friends, but, through word of mouth, demand grew quickly to include strangers. It wasn’t long before Karen knew she was on to something good.
Kenny and Karen’s love of hunting led to naming Kenny’s fishing vessel Whitetail, and Karen decided to extend the same name to her company, Whitetail Fisheries.
As her business continued to expand, Karen knew that she needed to contact local authorities about issues like licensing and whatever else she might need to know about operating a business. “I called and asked what I needed. I asked for an inspector to come by. He did, and the first thing he said was that I needed a separate building. So we went to work and built a store ourselves, mostly ourselves, and soon we had a building ready to go.”
Karen does some advertising, but word had spread that there was a “fish lady” running a cooked lobster business in Lorneville and she became an extremely busy woman. Karen laughs when she explains that she started cooking lobster with a single spaghetti pot and then moved up to a restaurant-size one, and eventually purchased a large 150-pound pot. “That’s my baby now,” she laughs.
“It wasn’t long before we had to build an addition on the store to give customers who were waiting to be served a proper place to stand in a shelter,” she says.
One thing led to another, and soon several local crafts people approached Karen to see if she would sell their goods on a commission basis. It was about then the idea of donating to the Halifax children’s hospital came along.
While the business has grown leaps and bounds in the past few years, the bulk of Karen’s work is still primarily about what she started out doing: selling cooked or live lobster during the lobster fishing season in southern New Brunswick, about three months in spring and then again in fall through to late January or early February.
Karen has a lobster holding pound on her home property that is supplied with ocean water through a pumping system from the sea nearby. Near the pound is where you will find her store, which has lobster tanks, cooking facilities, crafts, and more. Karen also sells clams and other fish products, but her “biggy” is still lobster, she says.
Kenny and his crew catch the lobster and land it at their wharf. Karen meets the boat on her tractor and brings the live lobster from the wharf to the pound.
Along with her full-time employee, Susan “Sue” Roach, Karen runs a very busy operation seven days a week. The busiest time is during the fall lobster fishery, which peaks leading up to Christmas. At this time, it gets so busy that every minute needs to be planned and organized. With Kenny and his crew working nearly around the clock on the boat, Karen sometimes has to enlist her two sons, Eric and Bronson, to help out while she and Sue race the clock at the store and the pound from seven o’clock in the morning until midnight. In those weeks, there is barely time to catch a nap or a meal. In fact, Karen says that some of their regular customers realize how busy they are and bring them snacks or even full lunches. “That is very nice and very touching,” Karen says.
Sue has become such an integral part of the business that Karen says she has to share her title. She now describes herself as just one of the two “Lobster Ladies” of Lorneville.
Ironically, both “lobster ladies” have developed allergies to lobster—but only if they eat it. Lucky for them, too, because some people with allergies can’t even be in the same room where lobster and other shellfish are cooked. Karen says the food allergy may not be a bad thing because it keeps them from sampling the goods too much.
Karen decided that she would give back some of her profit and she knew exactly what her charity of choice was. The IWK children’s hospital in Halifax often fundraises for new equipment and other things, and since that hospital was largely responsible for restoring her and her son’s health, it was a perfect match.
Some of the commissions from craft sales go into the IWK pot, along with money raised through several other schemes including a huge lobster cook-up party she and Kenny hold once a year at their cottage. Last year, 300 people showed up for that event and left thousands of dollars for the IWK fund, accounting for a sizable portion of the $18,200 they contributed to IWK in 2013.
In the off-season, when there is time to relax, Karen likes to travel. She and Kenny enjoy hiking and sometimes travel to Western Canada to hike in the mountains. They also enjoy hiking in Cape Breton. When they want to go somewhere warm, Karen says Barbados is a favourite southern destination. They hunt big game as often as possible; in fact, they enjoy hunting in Central Newfoundland. The McCavours collect moose and deer antlers and sometimes make chandeliers out of them. You can see some samples in their lodge.
Chapter 5
Salt of the Earth
It’s hard to write about Vernon Petten when you’re only allowed a couple of pages. That’s barely enough for an intro to a man who has spent more than sixty years fishing and who has been a volunteer extraordinaire at home and abroad.
Captain Vernon Petten mending trawl with son Blair in Port de Grave
Still living in Port de Grave, Newfoundland, the town where he was born eighty years ago, Vernon fished every species native to local waters. After chatting with him for an hour or so, you will undoubtedly hear about his passion for tuna fishing. Whether it was the size and majesty of the large bluefin or the big financial prize it paid back in Vernon’s heyday, there was something about fishing tuna that seemed to get his adrenaline going like none other.
He likes to talk about his most successful tuna year and one particular trip. It was just before his youngest son, Blair’s, wedding. The weather was bad and he could only get two deckhands to go with him, but his senses were telling him that there were tuna out there and, as far as he was concerned, they had his name on them. Blair was concerned that his dad wouldn’t be back in time for the wedding, but Vernon assured him that he would be home and with a good voyage under his belt. He was right, but it was only through a bit of good luck that he didn’t come back seriously injured.
While fishing in rough seas, Vernon was knocked off balance and went sliding across the deck, stopping only when his head smacked into a piece of steel equipment. The crew members wanted to get the skipper to the hospital, but Vernon was having none of that—there was work to be done, and a two- or three-inch gash in his head was no excuse to go home.
“No, no, we’re not going anywhere—you fellas can patch me up and we’re gonna go back fishing,” he stated firmly. The men did as the captain commanded, and despite a wide cut in his head that was bleeding profusely, they managed to bandage the wound sufficiently to stop the bleeding.
“The doctor told me later that they did a good job, although the dent is still there now,” he says, pointing to his head.
“And that turned out to be a real good trip. We got ei
ght tuna and I think we made $60,000 after expenses because they were big ones.” Vernon smiles, adding that he didn’t have any problems getting crew for his next tuna trip that year.
He relishes talking about his early days fishing with his father, Henry Petten. The Newfoundland fishery consisted of mainly salt cod back then with very little return on their investment, but he says they worked hard and always managed to get by, even when they were paid a measly two cents a pound.
When his dad wanted to get a new and bigger boat, there was plenty of discussion about affordability. That’s when Vernon proposed that he and his dad build the boat themselves—from the keel to the wheelhouse. Vernon was young and his dad was a little hesitant, but he decided that it was the only way they could afford a new vessel, so he agreed to give it a try. They cut their own logs, hauled them out from the woods, and went to work on building a longliner. While it might not have been a fancy construction, they built a good sea boat that served the family well. That was when Vernon got the boatbuilding bug. He perfected his construction skills through hard work, and today he holds the status of Master Boat Builder. He has built eleven longliners and repaired many more.
