An Avalon tale of bait and business

AVALON, N.J. - Tammie Carbohn dips her latex-gloved hand into a soggy cardboard tray of gray-green seaweed, and pulls out a clutch of fat, slimy, undulating 6-inch-long worms draped over her fingers.

"Bloodworms," she says, with admiration. "Twelve ninety-nine a dozen."

"We Federal Express them in from Maine," her husband, David, adds.

"These guys bite," Tammie says. "That's the business end," she points her index finger from a respectful distance at the pointy tip.

One of her regular customers, David Byrne, 44, a builder from Blue Bell, comes in, sets a plastic bucket on the counter, and asks, "Got any minnows?"

"Sorry," Tammie says. "We sold out at 7 a.m. You could try some shiners."

"They work for flounder?"

"Sure. You just have to give them more action and hook them through the eyes."

In the land of pale pink porches and Tourneau tan lines, putting greens and brunch overlooking the dunes, the Carbohns, remarkably, fit in just fine.

The couple, who met in the mid-1980s at Bensalem High School, are not the country club type. Until 1998, he worked as a supervisor for a trucking company. She worked as an office manager.

"But the corporate world wasn't good to us," he says. Neither he nor his wife could afford college, he says. "And without that slip of paper, you can only go so far."

So they quit their jobs in the Philadelphia suburbs and bought the Hodge Podge tackle shop in Avalon, making their home in the one-bedroom flat behind the shop.

They work seven days, 104 hours a week, getting up before dawn and staying up late, setting out minnow pots and cleaning clams, stocking boxes of lead weights, and, as cold-bloodedly as their worms, dispensing advice on how to gore a little baitfish in the eye.

This Memorial Day weekend didn't change their routine.

In the 10 years since gentrification and a consequent surge in real estate values created a whale of a breach between modest longtime residents and new big-time spenders in this increasingly wealthy, vanilla beach community, the Carbohns are able to relate to everyone quite nicely.

That's because they deal in a sport that gives no great advantage to the lavishly equipped. One that requires the player to match wits, and skill, and patience with nature.

So the photos they post on the corkboard beside the entrance feature a wide range of fishermen (and a few women): contractors, lawyers, teenagers, and one certified bio-energy healer who believes he's the reincarnated Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Sure, the Carbohns say, their customers who invest in the rods and reels that cost $200 to $500 have more finely tuned tools than the ones who can afford only the $20 stuff.

But what really makes the difference is dedication. "The more time you spend on the water, the more skill you'll have," David says.

His father, a mason, used to take the family to Cape May in summer to go fishing in his 21-foot Wellcraft, christened, frankly, "The Boat."

He grew to love it, and would drive down from his home in Montgomery County to spend every weekend on the water. Tammie never spent much time at the Shore until she met David.

Now, she loves fishing, but acknowledges she hates seafood.

What does she like?

"Pizza, hamburgers, you know, the good stuff."

The tackle shop dates from 1962, they say. That was the year a major nor'easter tore through on Ash Wednesday, ripping away huge portions of coastline and causing massive flooding. As part of the town's efforts to stave off erosion, the 8th Street jetty was built. It's become one of the prime fishing spots around - and, yesterday, the hopeful had stationed themselves all along it, many with Hodge Podge bait buckets.

The Carbohns estimate that 90 percent of their customers are men. Yesterday, in a two-hour period, only two women came in: one who tried to help her boyfriend's buddy pick out a pair of sunglasses, and another who asked for "a thing of squid."

The only other female presence was Honey, their year-old terrier mix, who greets, selectively, the right kind of customers.

David says they've worked to improve the gender balance. "We try to keep the fish smell out for the ladies," he says. "We use a lot of Pine Sol."

The problem probably has more to do with the visual and tactile, Tammie says, blithely pulling a few deceased worms from a tangle of seaweed and setting them aside. "Bait is slimy stuff."

On the second day of Memorial Day weekend, they opened their shop as usual, at 6 a.m., and would stay open until 9 p.m. It sits on the corner of Ocean Drive and 24th Street, a quick trip from the 8th Street jetty, which is where most of their customers caught the gargantuan striped bass featured in the photos on the Hodge Podge corkboard.

They keep a big television screen on the counter. Yesterday, they featured the gripping DVD Stripers Gone Wild, with extensive underwater footage of "savage feeding action."

Few of the customers stopped to watch. They were headed for the playing fields, where the sea spits at the rocks and the fish try men's patience.

The guy trying on sunglasses (a 28-year-old pharmaceutical salesman from Ardmore) ended up leaving without a pair, but he offered to help pay for the hooks and bait that his friend (a Center City lawyer) picked up.

Byrne, the regular who bought the shiners, thought he might take his children to the jetty. He's been coming to Avalon since he was a boy, he said. "My parents bought their lot in 1968 for $11,000. They built their house in '75 for $42,000. Now everybody we know tells us it's a tear-down at $2.5."

As in million.

"But I don't want to tear it down," he says, laughing. He has three sisters and a brother, only one of whom lives nearby. "This is the only place we all come together."

The price of staying continues to rise, he says. "I know!" David says. "Our taxes doubled last year."

Still, they can't see leaving Avalon.

David retreats to the kitchen to finish packing up a sinkful of surf clams for bait. Honey trots into the living room and curls up at the foot of the couch. Tammie rings up another sale of shiners. The cash register sings.

"This is home," she says.

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