Land & Sea: Lobster fishermen get back to their roots in an abandoned community
Going back to Prowseton, Placentia Bay circa 1992 with the crew of Land & Sea
When Carl and Lloyd Wheaton left the fishing grounds of Notre Dame Bay for Placentia Bay, they were just looking for a place where the sea ice wouldn't keep them from the full potential of the lobster season — delaying the start of the season, or busting their gear when they did get out.
Finally, one year, they didn't get out to fish lobster at all. That was the year they decided they'd had enough, and went searching for a new place to fish.
That was 1974, and in the time since the two men hadn't only found an abundant lobster ground — one that let them do much better financially — they had also found a new home in a place that others had given up on because of its isolation.
Prowseton in Placentia Bay
Prowseton, Placentia Bay was never a large community. Before the town was abandoned in the mid-1960s, about nine families lived there. They were eventually driven out by the lack of amenities: there was no school, no telegraph office, no coastal boat stopping in.
When Carl Wheaton and his nephew Lloyd found Prowseton there was only one house still standing, used by a single family that came back to fish in the summer.
The two had overlooked other, more popular lobster-fishing spots among the small islands and fog of Placentia Bay, and they were rewarded for that search with great fishing. The next fishing season, they brought their wives out to Prowseton with them.
Those early times in Prowseton were hard, even just for the fishing season, said Carl's wife Joyce Wheaton. The first summer she was there, before they had built a cabin for themselves, the couple lived in a small, old gear shed.
"End of the evenings, you put out your table and then you put in your bed for to go to sleep," she said. Sometimes she felt as though she could climb the walls, spending the summer months in a small, single room.
'This is a second home'
Things eventually got more comfortable in Prowseton, she said, though she still tires of the isolation after a while and usually only joins her husband there for the lobster season.
But even after a cabin was built and the place felt more settled, Joyce didn't expect Carl would take to the place like he did. Carl and Lloyd both found a personal peace in Prowseton, increasingly spending more and more time there as the years went on.
For Lloyd Wheaton, part of that peace comes from knowing he no longer has to worry about where his next job will come from. In his last season lobster fishing in Notre Dame Bay, he made only $700. In the first year in Prowseton, he made $7,000.
That money did require a lot of work. The two men had to build things, like a wharf, that would have already been there, or been provided by the government, in another fishing community.
"We were working then from daylight to dark, whatever time daylight came and whatever time dark came," Lloyd Wheaton said.
But he used to have to leave home for work to get his family through the year, looking for jobs in construction or truck driving, and now he does not have to do that.
Joyce enjoys her time in Prowseton as well. The couple's four grown children also spent a lot of time there growing up and still return when they can.
"This is a second home, really is now, even for the children as well as us," she said.
Living there year round
That home is a place of play now as well as work. On a calm day, the two couples might go out in search of scallops, then spend a few hours together on shore cooking over a fire and enjoying a meal literally plucked from the ocean only moments before.
When his wife is back at home, Lloyd misses her, but he loves living year-round in a place where he is surrounded by nature and quiet.
"Everything is so peaceful and quiet and natural. That's the only way I can describe it," he said.
"You can see something beautiful every day."
Carl Wheaton spends even more time alone, but is content. He bottles rabbit, turr, cod tongues, salmon, duck and capelin, finding it satisfying to keep himself fed with food from the land and sea that he stores in his root cellar.
"The only thing I don't bottle is lobsters," he said. "Haven't got to go to the store for nothing, hardly."
He had a retirement home in Prowseton built and ready for his 65th birthday.
"Where can you find a better place in the world than here? That's what I say to myself and I do that quite often, in the run of a year, quite often," he said.
"I'm certainly blessed to be here."
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