Critter’s Bait & Tackle on Savannah Road has been selling live shrimp, cut bait, and local fishing knowledge since the early 1990s, and the man behind the counter most mornings is the same one who opened the place.
Roy Kinsey — most people just call him Critter, which is where the name came from — grew up fishing the St. Lucie River with his father and never really left. He’s a compact, unhurried man in his early sixties who speaks quietly and means every word. When he tells you the snook are staging near the C-24 outflow or that the redfish have been moving shallow on the falling tide, he’s not guessing. He’s been watching this water for decades.
The shop itself is small. One room, basically, with a wall of rod holders, a cooler full of live bait near the door, a register that may predate the internet, and a hand-lettered board listing what’s currently running and what it’ll run you. Spinning rigs and leader material hang from pegboard hooks. There are a few local fishing maps under laminate on the counter. Nothing is decorative. Everything is there because someone needed it.
Kinsey opened Critter’s after years of working at a larger tackle chain on the coast and deciding he didn’t like being managed by people who didn’t fish. He wanted something smaller, something where he could actually talk to customers. “I’m not selling product,” he told me once, when I asked about his approach. “I’m telling people where to go.” He means that literally — he’ll sketch a map on a receipt if he has to.
The regulars are a mix: retired guys who come in every other day, younger anglers who found the place on a fishing forum, guides who stop by for bulk bait before dawn. On weekend mornings, the parking lot holds a dozen trucks before 7 a.m. Kinsey is already there, usually by 5:30, because the live shrimp delivery comes early and he checks every batch himself.
Prices are fair and the scale of the operation keeps overhead low, so you’re not paying marina markup on a dozen shrimp. A scoop of live shrimp runs around four or five dollars. Artificial lures from local brands — DOA, Gulp, a few regional soft plastics — are stocked alongside the standard national names. Kinsey doesn’t carry much he doesn’t believe in.
He’s also, quietly, one of the better sources for honest fishing reports in St. Lucie County. He doesn’t have a YouTube channel or a newsletter. If you want to know what’s biting and where, you go in and ask. He’ll tell you, and he won’t dress it up. If the bite has been slow, he’ll say so. If a particular stretch of river has been producing trout on the incoming tide, he’ll tell you that too, and he’ll probably mention which lure color has been working and why he thinks that is.
Critter’s isn’t the largest tackle shop in the area. It’s not trying to be. But for anglers who want a straight answer about South Florida fishing from someone who actually knows the water, there aren’t many better places to start a morning.
