Bait shops struggling
Saturday, July 17, 2004
THE SAGINAW NEWS
Joe Snapper, staff writer for The
Saginaw News
Jack W. Marko's business is
spineless. And he's proud: When it comes to his worms, only the plumpest will
do. Every day the 61-year-old runs his fingers through soil, raking hearty
nightcrawlers out for sale. He discards others freely, pitching even stout,
squirming crawlers if they're missing an end off their tubular frames. "I
count every one of them," says the 30-year owner of St. Charles Bait Shop,
715 N. Saginaw. "You gotta sort through them. You gotta get the broke ones
out, the dead ones out. Some people will throw in a big one that's got a small
chunk missing. I won't do that. That's not good presentation of the bait."
In the world of waxworms, leafworms,
crickets, wigglers, crawlers, flatheads and shiners, there's an ethic to
marketing invertebrates. Yet, after decades of peddling fishing bait and
tackle, a group of Saginaw County shop owners say worming their way to a living
in Saginaw County is nearing extinction. The problem isn't that fish aren't
biting, they say. It's that anglers aren't giving smallmouth bass, crappie,
catfish and other species a chance.
Mid-Michigan fisheries experts and
outdoor sports observers say lousy weather, E-coli scares and pollution itself
-- including the Tittabawassee River dioxin's notoriety -- have pushed weekend
anglers to northern lakes and elsewhere. Friday, the Saginaw County Department
of Public Health issued a revised advisory that indicated "surface water
samples collected recently from Saginaw County rivers indicate that E-coli
bacteria levels remain elevated in ... the Flint River, Bad, Cass and
Shiawassee rivers," and to avoid full body contact with the Saginaw River
south of Rust Avenue."
However overall, state officials
announce cheerily, Michigan's summer fisheries are booming. "We hear
reports fishing's excellent," says Todd A. Grischke, a Department of
Natural Resources Fisheries Division supervisor in Lansing.
'The worst ever'
That's a jolt to the community that
spawned Trout Unlimited, even though the activist organization dominated by
fly-fishermen are enamored largely of trout-infested waters to the north and
west.
So the assault on summer Saginaw
Valley river angling has left a quartet of independent bait shop owners reeling
-- no pun intended, they lament. They're so busy trying to stay open, they've
no chance to wet a line in pursuit of the passion that hooked them on selling
bait.
"It's disgusting," says
Vincent J. Cox, who runs Cox's Bait and Tackle, 1844 Evon.
The 62-year-old hasn't gone fishing
yet this summer and says sales are down more than 1,000 percent over 2003. "I
thought last year was the worst ever," he says of commerce at the
converted garage he's run as a full-service bait shop from his Spaulding
Township home since 1977. "This is turning out to be the worst."
Bleaker yet are prospects at R &
R Bait and Tackle, 9800 Gratiot, where Ronald T. Schumacher Jr. quit ordering
live bait as of June. The Thomas Township shop proprietor of five years has
slashed his hours and recently marked all tackle "33 percent off." "No
business: That's what I'm experiencing," says the 40-year-old who
calculates his sales have plummeted 1,900 percent over last year. "Cash
flow is real bad. I'll be lucky if I make it through the summer."
The situation is so severe that
Arnold L. Alexander's wife, Bonnie, refused to buy a fishing license this year.
The couple once made nightly fishing dates on the Saginaw River rippling 50
yards away. Now they bemoan a 50 percent sales dip at Riverside Bait, 2117 S.
River. "It's killing us," says Alexander, 70, who's run his bait,
tackle and reconditioned outboard motor business for 21 years. "Another
year, if this don't improve, I'm going to shut down."
If the end is near, Marko isn't
sweating.
Sales have slumped 60 percent, but
he says he won't go under "as long as I got a car to sell."
For three decades, Marko has served
customers round-the-clock. He springs from sleep to scoop an angler her
crawlers. "Two o'clock, three, four, five --you get up with a smile,"
he says.
Schumacher says he once made 50
sales daily. His recent average is five. He hasn't taken a custom-rod building
order in more than a year. "I take it one day at a time," he says.
Cox used to sell 20,000 crawlers a
week. Nowadays he says he might sell 250.
"You make money off 'em all the
time," he says drily. "You just don't make a lot. ... It's not worth
sitting around for a dollar a day."
'In a panic'
They chiefly blame an ongoing E-coli
bacteria advisory blanketing the Saginaw River system, comprising the Saginaw,
Bad, Cass, Flint, Tittabawassee and Shiawassee rivers.
"It's got people in a
panic," Cox says. "Last year, people from Flint, Montrose, Grand
Rapids -- customers, I used to have a lot of them. They don't come any
more."
Since May, the advisories have
warned weekly against full or partial body submersion in one or all of the
streams, county officials say. "This summer has been unusual," says
Kevin W. Datte, the county Health Department's environmental health services
director who issues the notices based on weekly tests. Datte says sustained
summer sunshine that kills off bacteria has proven rare. And record May
rainfalls earlier flushed putrid storm sewer holdings into fisheries.
"It's always been the thought
that the solution to pollution is dilution," he says. "We learned
that's not the case."
For instance, Thomas L. Heritier,
membership secretary and past president of the Saginaw Field and Stream Club,
hasn't launched his boat on any of the rivers yet this summer because of
E-coli.
"The water's more disgusting
than the worm guts," says a recent bait business casualty, Woodrow L.
Wilson, of E-coli. The 41-year-old ran a bait shop with his brother at Michigan
and Gratiot for 20 years before shuttering in March. To the end, he was turning
out-of-town anglers away from the polluted waters.
'Shops go under every day'
The weather hasn't helped, fisheries
experts say. May flooding crippled spring walleye fishing and scuttled a DNR
creel census, while a summer of cold fronts and downpours has hampered river
anglers, says James P. Baker, a district fisheries biologist overseeing parts
of 22 southeast Michigan counties. Baker is skeptical, however, of a local
bait-shop apocalypse, noting that fish levels remain robust and adding that
"bait shops go under every day."
"My old boss used to say the
average life span of a mom-and-pop bait shop is three years," he says. "Small
shops have always had a very hard time competing with the big chain stores, the
Wal-Marts, the Kmarts, the Meijers. All of these places offer a lot fishing
tackle at very competitive prices. Most are offering live bait, too."
All three big-box chains in Saginaw
County sell nightcrawlers, as do sundry party stores. The state regulates only
minnows, crawlers and crayfish, issuing retailers a $25 license to sell all
three, Baker says. Meanwhile, fishing license sales in Saginaw County have slid
slightly each year since 1999, the DNR's license division reports, though the
slump mirrors a likewise decline statewide.
For the future: If the shops vanish,
how will fall walleye anglers in The Saginaw News Shiver on the River contest
get their shiners? "That's a good question," says Greg A. Csercse, a
walleye tournament fisherman who ran Fish On!, a bait and tackle store on
Gratiot near Lyon, in the mid-1990s. "They'll be out of luck."
Whatever the agent of their demise
--if it ever occurs -- bait shop owners will guard their knowledge, they say. Twice,
Cox says, he entrusted to employees his methods of keeping hordes of minnows
and nightcrawlers alive, only to twice suffer betrayal. Both ex-confidants
applied their industrial espionage to opening rival shops.
Both promptly folded, Cox notes
wryly. "You'll never get that from me," he says of crawler bedding
and minnow care. "That's a trade secret. That'll go to the grave with
me."
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