Norm's bait guaranteed to catch fish or die trying

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CROSS LAKE TWP – Norm’s Bait Shop has achieved its success after years of adjustment and refinement, said owner Jules St. Peter about the year-round business, the only bait shop of its kind in the area.

HERE FISHIE, FISHIE - St. Peter nets pin smelt to sell as bait. - Julie Daigle images

He said his shop is the “premier bait shop” for the St. John Valley.

“Our bait is guaranteed to catch fish or to die trying,” he said, tongue-in-cheek. “You can buy bait anywhere, but you can only buy good bait here.”

Most shops are only open for a few weeks in the winter, he pointed out.

The shop, which is located next to St. Peter’s Country Store in Cross Lake, stocks 20,000 fish, including pin smelts, their “daddies,” tommy cod, golden shiners and silver shiners, said St. Peter.

With the muskie season right around the corner, they will soon carry the suckers that are muskie hunters’ preferred bait.

He said fishermen are a “tough breed,” with almost every fisherman or woman having a preferred bait species and size, and he tries to accommodate them all.

The business carries banded killfish in the summers as well as nightcrawlers, dillies, or baby crawlers, and worms year-round.

“We like to provide [our customers] with the very best,” he said.

He said the shop always carries between eight and 10 different kinds of fish for their customers, who range from locals to people from away.

“We get people from all over,” he said.

Pin smelt in bait tank. - Julie Daigle image

The bait shop is named after St. Peter’s 90-year-old father, Norman St. Peter, who still visits the store every day.

St. Peter renovated the shop two years ago, after years of use and year-round storage of water had essentially rotted it out from the inside. Now, the shop is built like a car wash, he said.

He called the process of learning exactly which fish need what to survive a science. Even with his experience, he said smelts are the hardest fish to keep alive.

“It’s a lot of work,” he said, about running the bait shop.

According to St. Peter, Norm’s Bait Shop has a 90 percent survival rate for their bait fish, which he called “rare.”

In the summer, St. Peter catches most of the live bait they use. The rest of the year, Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife requires them to buy the live bait they sell from southern Maine.

“I’ve argued with them for years,” he said. “The lakes are open, but it’s not feasible to go in them.”

He said it makes no sense to tell people that they have to buy their bait downstate and then close lakes in this area to the use of live bait because of threats from invasive species.

St. Peter was referring to a recent legislative initiative in which special interests attempted to push this agenda through the legislature, although it appears that the movement has lost steam, said Senator Troy Jackson in a recent interview. Paul Bernier of the Long Lake Ice Fishing Derby said there was a lot of local opposition to the measure.

St. Peter praised the Long Lake Ice Fishing Derby as a source of stimulation for the local economy.

“It ensures our livelihood,” he said. “It’s a good thing.”

St. Peter’s Country Store has been in his family for three generations. His grandmother opened it in 1898 as a post office and later, as a place to sell items she and her husband Jules made on the farm. This was typical for many of the farms in the area, but St. Peter’s is the one that has survived.

The store sells anything and everything that people passing by could want, from snacks and gloves, fly lures and snowshoes, old VHS tapes and tee-shirts, to snowmobile belts and oil. St. Peter also rents cabins to the ice fishing and snowmobile crowd in the winter and kayaks to the fishing and outdoor recreation crowd in the summer. His store provides a parking place for cross-country skiers, boat access to Mud Lake, a local waterbody surrounded by private land and without a public boat launch, and fishermen access to one of the best fishing spots for fly fishing in the area.

St. Peter remembers when there were six or seven of these small country stores in the area.
After 33 years, he’s thinking of retiring, he said. Like other businessmen in the area, he said he remembers having one-eighth of the business he has now and making a similar profit.

“I figure I make about $0.50 an hour,” he said, chuckling. “I figure it’s time for me to enjoy the fruits of my labor.”

He sees his job as helping people who are from someplace non-local to remember this area.

“We send people home with a smile on their faces,” he said. “We want them to come back, to tell their friends and to bring more.”

For everyone accustomed to stopping into the shop on Route 161, or Caribou Road, the area institution will be open for at least another year or two, and if the Valley is lucky, some enterprising young local will take it on for another 33 years.

“We don’t live here to become millionaires,” said St. Peter. “We live here because we live like millionaires.”