I messed around and went to Cabelas a couple of days ago to buy some crappie jigs and when I entered the place, about the size of an old WalMart, and saw they had exactly 4 aisles about 20 foot long as their "fishing department" I knew I was looking at one of the seven signs of the apocalypse. They had aboout 14 acres of Columbia Sporstwear and about 2 acres of ammunition and about 80 linear feet of fishing tackle. Amazing.
This lead me to wax nostalgic, as I am wont to do, about a sure enough, good old fashioned bait shop. The kind of place where when you buy a box of red wrigglers they dump them in a stainless steel scoop for your viewing pleasure. The kind of place with a white cricket box and where they ask you what size minnow you want when you tell them you want 3 dozen....cause they got them in different sizes. The kind of place that still has Tom Mann Jelly Worms....real ones, not something that is made to look like one....and they still smell like grape jelly. A real bait shop will sell spring lizards when bass are on bed because...well if you don't know I ain't telling it. They will have leaches. Leaches for crying out loud. When was the last time someone bought a leach? The kind of place where the same hands that just counted out 3 dozen crappie minnows and shifted through a glob of nightcrawlers will fix you a BBQ sandwich if you want one, and you never thought to notice if they washed their hands first or not. They kind of place that had a bragging board and, if you were lucky, more than few of your own mugshots were hanging on that board.
Right off the top of my head I can think of 3 such places which no longer exist. Blackstocks on Fairburn Road in Fairburn. If a fish had been caught in North Georgia in the 50 years before they closed they had the bait it was caught on. If you went in there and asked for a unicorn haired jig, 1/4 oz, they'd ask what color. They had a store about the size of a modern day Circle K and had more inventory at any given time than Cabelas sells in a year. And if it was a bait that lived? They had it.
The second one was The DugOut on HWY 41 about Acworth. They had it ALL. They had bait tanks when no one knew what a bait tank was. They had nearly an acre of minnows. If you needed it they had it and many's the time you didn't know you needed it until you saw it at the DugOut.
The third such place was the bait barge at the lock and dam in Rome. That place was special in a time and place where special things were everywhere you looked. For those who never knew it it was a barge, rumored to have been the last one pushed upriver from Gasden, which had gotten stuck on a sand bar and arrived a couple of days after the last operation of Mayo Lock. This may or may not be true but it certainly existed, right next to the boat ramp, and some enterprising Floyd County man built a shop on it, installed a grill, and proceeded to sell bait and breakfast/lunch and more than a few dinners to folks fishing the Coosa River. It also had any kind of bait imaginable. There'd be jon boats tied up three deep around that barge when the crappie were up the river. This thing was straight out of Mark Twain and anyone who knew it when it existed and didn't think of Tom Sawyer had either never read Twain or was some kind of trogolodyte unknown in the south until recently. I was out of the country when it dissapeared and I am glad to have not been around because it was the end of an era in the south.
Anybody else have a bait shop they remember...or know of one that exists today??? They are few and far between now a days....many places sell bait but very few bait shops left.
This lead me to wax nostalgic, as I am wont to do, about a sure enough, good old fashioned bait shop. The kind of place where when you buy a box of red wrigglers they dump them in a stainless steel scoop for your viewing pleasure. The kind of place with a white cricket box and where they ask you what size minnow you want when you tell them you want 3 dozen....cause they got them in different sizes. The kind of place that still has Tom Mann Jelly Worms....real ones, not something that is made to look like one....and they still smell like grape jelly. A real bait shop will sell spring lizards when bass are on bed because...well if you don't know I ain't telling it. They will have leaches. Leaches for crying out loud. When was the last time someone bought a leach? The kind of place where the same hands that just counted out 3 dozen crappie minnows and shifted through a glob of nightcrawlers will fix you a BBQ sandwich if you want one, and you never thought to notice if they washed their hands first or not. They kind of place that had a bragging board and, if you were lucky, more than few of your own mugshots were hanging on that board.
Right off the top of my head I can think of 3 such places which no longer exist. Blackstocks on Fairburn Road in Fairburn. If a fish had been caught in North Georgia in the 50 years before they closed they had the bait it was caught on. If you went in there and asked for a unicorn haired jig, 1/4 oz, they'd ask what color. They had a store about the size of a modern day Circle K and had more inventory at any given time than Cabelas sells in a year. And if it was a bait that lived? They had it.
The second one was The DugOut on HWY 41 about Acworth. They had it ALL. They had bait tanks when no one knew what a bait tank was. They had nearly an acre of minnows. If you needed it they had it and many's the time you didn't know you needed it until you saw it at the DugOut.
The third such place was the bait barge at the lock and dam in Rome. That place was special in a time and place where special things were everywhere you looked. For those who never knew it it was a barge, rumored to have been the last one pushed upriver from Gasden, which had gotten stuck on a sand bar and arrived a couple of days after the last operation of Mayo Lock. This may or may not be true but it certainly existed, right next to the boat ramp, and some enterprising Floyd County man built a shop on it, installed a grill, and proceeded to sell bait and breakfast/lunch and more than a few dinners to folks fishing the Coosa River. It also had any kind of bait imaginable. There'd be jon boats tied up three deep around that barge when the crappie were up the river. This thing was straight out of Mark Twain and anyone who knew it when it existed and didn't think of Tom Sawyer had either never read Twain or was some kind of trogolodyte unknown in the south until recently. I was out of the country when it dissapeared and I am glad to have not been around because it was the end of an era in the south.
Anybody else have a bait shop they remember...or know of one that exists today??? They are few and far between now a days....many places sell bait but very few bait shops left.
