PETTY HARBOUR, N.L. — Petty Harbour checks all the boxes — prettier-than-a-postcard fishing village, a quick run from St. John’s, and a mix of attractions to keep the streets lined with tourists and day-trippers who find a spot to pull over in between all the no-parking signs.
There’s the Mini Aquarium, the coveted fish and chips at Chafe’s Landing, the waterShed coffee shop, North Atlantic Ziplines, and new sensation Tinkers Ice Cream among the other business draws and the sheer beauty of the horseshoe-shaped working harbour lined with fishing stages and colourful boats.
“It’s booming here — booming, booming, booming,” observed retired fisherman Bob Chafe, who said he was proud and surprised to find himself featured in a National Geographic centrespread a few years ago, filleting fish.
The craziest thing the tourists from all over the world have asked him?
“Where can I park?” he replied, acknowledging even the Anglican Church had to bar its lot because people were parking on the grass.
It’s just an unreal situation, he and others say of the traffic that flows through the narrow streets, and the sheer number of people from around the province, particularly the St. John's metro area, who join the tourists flocking to Petty Harbour.
But Bob Chafe said the chaos is only a couple of months in summer, and it’s great to see all the visitors.
“It’s been really crazy the last five years,” said Dave Hickey, a fisherman who lives in adjacent Maddox Cove.
He said the crowds, at their thickest on the weekends, don’t interfere much with fishermen, who are on the go early in the morning.
“What can you do? Why fight tourism? It’s here. That’s it,” he said.
The town is properly called Petty Harbour-Maddox Cove, but the two are a bit like chalk and cheese in their looks and needs — Petty Harbour being the heritage village and Maddox Cove being the modern section.
A big complaint in Maddox Cove, according to Mayor Sam Lee, is stray cats. In Petty Harbour it’s aging infrastructure, parking and a lack of space that’s hampering future business.
Waves of visitors
As a weekday opens in Petty Harbour, the activity is pretty much confined to locals going about their routines — town workers fixing a broken water main, shop owners preparing for the day, the normal life of any place.
As the sun heats up and the clock ticks on, the visitors begin arriving in waves. Some have said tourists sometimes mistake Petty Harbour for a living museum — the audience strolling around and interacting with local characters as they put on a show.
Except it’s real life, one that’s filled with the usual small-town drama and dominated this time of year by the biggest problem of all — how to accommodate the crowds. Many worry about what might happen if there is ever a fire and emergency vehicles have to get through the streets, often made more narrow by cars parked on both sides of the road.
Others shrug it off as a necessary conundrum, and suggest that any car blocking a fire truck would be shoved out of the way in a hurry.
“You can’t move around. It’s blocked,” said one fisherman, who wouldn’t discuss it further.
“I haven’t got a problem. Some people complain. It is what it is. It doesn’t take me all day to get out of Petty Harbour,” said Bobby Chafe, another retired fisherman, whose tidy generational home overlooking the harbour has been photographed time and again.
It’s all you can do when there’s no room for sidewalks, noted Glen Whitten, who works for the town.
Bobby Chafe is the kind of local who likes to have a yarn on his doorstep, and will invite you in for a cup of coffee.
One time, Whitten said, he wouldn’t be allowed on this Catholic side of the harbour, but then he married into it.
They said the decades-ago dissension between Anglicans and Catholics — each once dominating opposing sides of Petty Harbour, with rocks hurled if someone tried to cross the dividing bridge — has faded away.
Some other residents are not so sure.
Like a park
Nelson Chafe, Bobby’s son, moved home after more than two decades in British Columbia for the good life in Petty Harbour, and the crowds don’t faze him either.
“It makes the whole town like a park,” he said, strolling out to the deck with his morning coffee.
Danny Bronstein of Winnipeg was lured to Petty Harbour through the music of Great Big Sea, fronted by Petty Harbour hero Alan Doyle.
The proximity to St. John’s International Airport was a bonus amid his plans to get out and see the Avalon.
“It’s quaint. It’s pretty,” he said.
“It’s the only province I haven’t been to and was on my bucket list.”
Richard and Kate Sayer of New Mexico, U.S., were halfway through their East Coast Trail trek when they stopped in at Petty Harbour and ate ice cream from Tinkers while sitting on the dock.
Richard had previously been to the province for a marine biotechnology conference and wanted to bring Kate, a retired teacher, here.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
Inside, Chad Doyle waited with his family for their ice cream. At least once a year they do the loop, visiting Petty Harbour on the drive to Cape Spear, including a trip to the Mini Aquarium across the harbour for the kids.
Tinkers — operated by Chafe’s Landing owners Todd and Angela Chafe — started last summer as a spillover for the Chafe’s Landing demand. But the ice cream got so popular, the fish and chips takeout has been discontinued and the parlour is jammed as soon as the doors open at 11 a.m.
The $12 Freak Shakes are a huge attraction, as are the custom-made ice cream sandwiches.
"Nobody is doing anything like it. It’s something different,” said employee Kristen Locke of nearby Goulds, who went to school with kids from Petty Harbour-Maddox Cove and likes the coolness factor of the community.
First pub
The bustle of Petty Harbour has prompted a new pub to open on the premises of North Atlantic Ziplines.
“I love Petty Harbour. It’s my favourite place,” said Laura Smith, whose husband, Phil, is the zipline operations manager.
They had lived in the St. John’s outskirts of Petty Harbour, but because Laura operates a farm besides her duties at the zipline business, they now live with their family in Tors Cove.
The pub, fitted out by Phil over the winter, features finger foods like fish and brewis and spring rolls.
Rhodie Anne Woodland and her business partner, Phyllis Weir, developed Herbie's Olde Craft Shoppe, named for Weir’s late father, who ran a general store there. They still use brown paper and string to wrap customers’ purchases, and all the shelves and drawers are vintage, original to the store, built in 1933.
Early in the morning is quiet, said Woodland.
“All of a sudden, you start hearing the traffic. … Petty Harbour was never built to have cars,” she said.
The 19 years of the shop's life have been good, with Newfoundland and Labrador artisans filling the shelves and tourists emptying them. Woodland loves the location.
“I love to see the boats go in the water in the spring and it comes to life all over again,” she said.
This year has been particularly awash in visitors from New Zealand and Australia.
“They are looking for a place of beauty and seasons,” she said. “They love to watch the fog roll in and out.”
Eleven years ago, Angela Chafe and her husband, Todd, who grew up in Petty Harbour, opened the wildly popular Chafe’s Landing, which sometimes has a wait of an hour and a half for a table and has expanded as far as current room allows it — it started out as eight tables in a house. The restaurant has catered to the likes of country music queen Reba McEntire and Alan
Doyle’s buddy, actor Russell Crowe. And last summer the couple opened Tinker’s.
They say they’ve offered to buy some town land behind them to solve some of the traffic congestion, but can’t get anywhere.
“They don’t want the tourists,” said Angela, who saw the potential early and has other ideas, but is reluctant to open anything else due to the dissension.
Council doesn’t support business, said Todd, who recounted having a hammer in his hand to fix a piece of clapboard and getting a call from the council to stop.
“It’s an awful way to be,” he said.
Ronnie Bidgood, who owns a swath of land along the harbourfront — now barricaded with his crab pots and no trespassing signs — said he has also offered a solution: to lease his land to the town for 30 parking spaces, but he can’t get anywhere.
He said he has been ordered to move his crab pots and has felt intimidated by council, but considers it a liability to allow anyone to park on his land.
“I could throw up dealing with council,” he said.
Great big sightseers
In a small fishing stage on the Anglican side of the harbour, George Chafe — Todd’s father — and his lifelong friend, Murray Lee, were sitting in the shade and taking all the fuss in stride as long-retired fishermen.
They bantered over the semantics of their ages — 82 and 80 — and Lee didn’t want his photo taken by The Telegram, figuring it would be plastered all over.
They remember when Petty Harbour got its first car.
“And he wasn’t from here,” said Lee.
“All you had was a wheelbarrow to go around,” said George.
George — who in the 1950s and ’60s drove for a local bus service that drove people back and forth to work and shopping in St. John’s — recounted going to Dildo recently and seeing the same kind of congestion.
The way they see it, it’s the good with the bad and no different than Water Street in St. John’s.
“It’s a job to get around the tourists. They are all over the road,” said Lee. “It’s good to see it. But the harbour is too small for what’s going ahead now.”
George hasn’t been over to the ice cream parlour, since he had a heart bypass and is not allowed to have it.
But the rifts in the town he puts off as petty jealously from those seeing someone else do well.
Looking for answers
Mayor Sam Lee said the town is working on solutions — which include a parking lot on Skinner’s Hill, next to the power plant. He said the council thought it was only going to cost about $60,000, but was shocked at the bill and will likely have to do it in phases.
A student was even hired to pass out handbills warning people they could be ticketed for parking illegally, and the town is pursuing getting approval from the province to ticket and is proposing to hire a municipal officer.
The new parking lot won’t come close to solving the troubles, Lee acknowledged, noting Petty Harbour is surrounded by hills too dangerous to blast, as well as flood plains — one previous parking proposal along the river was nixed because of that.
Standing on the wharf, he pointed toward the large area around the harbour that was infilled with dredged silt to create space on land — the waterline used to skirt the main road in many places.
The inner harbour has changed a lot from its early days as a fishing village, said Lee, who recalled as a boy swimming in it among discarded fish guts and the maggots they attracted.
His opinion that it’s clean enough to drink now may not hold water, but it certainly draws admirers to gaze at the view.
Sam Lee said some people have parked their cars dead centre in the road and walked on, and pedestrians often walk three or four abreast, jamming traffic. It’s hard to track down the cars’ owners, as they could be anywhere enjoying the attractions.
“God forbid we ever have a real emergency. It would be a job to get them through,” he said.
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