The sign above the door at Catalone’s Bait & Tackle on Seaward Avenue is sun-bleached to the point where you have to already know what it says. Earl Catalone, 67, has been behind the counter here since 1994, and he’ll be the first to tell you that’s not something he planned. He was working at a machine shop when his father-in-law offered him the shop lease, and he just never left.
Earl is a compact man with a gray mustache and the particular patience of someone who has answered the same question — what’s hitting right now? — roughly eleven thousand times. He answers it the same way every time: carefully, and with follow-up questions. What stretch of Tuna Creek? What time of day? You fishing a pool or running water? He takes the question seriously, which is why the regulars keep coming back to ask it.
The shop itself is small, maybe 400 square feet, and organized the way only someone who knows exactly where everything is could organize it. Fly tying materials fill one wall of pegboard. There’s a glass case with spinners and jig heads sorted by weight, a rack of waders folded flat near the back, and a cooler near the door stocked with wax worms and nightcrawlers. Earl keeps local creek reports in his head, not on a website. He follows the temperature gauges on the upper branches of Tuna Creek the way some people follow weather forecasts.
The shop does sell standard tackle — rods, reels, line, terminal gear at fair prices — but that’s not quite the point. What you’re really paying for when you stop in is the intelligence. Earl knows who was on the water yesterday and what they caught. He knows which pools fish slow after a rain and which ones come alive. He knows the difference between a seasonal shift and a weather blip, and he’ll tell you which one you’re in right now without making you feel dumb for asking.
There’s a coffee maker on a folding table by the register, and if you come in before eight in the morning, there’s a decent chance two or three other anglers are already standing around it. These are the conversations Bradford doesn’t really advertise: a retired schoolteacher talking about a brown trout he spotted but didn’t hook on Saturday, a guy from Olean who makes the drive specifically because Earl ordered him a particular reel he couldn’t find anywhere else, a teenager learning to tie a Pheasant Tail nymph on the small vise Earl keeps at the end of the counter for exactly that purpose.
Earl charges maybe ten dollars for a carton of crawlers, twenty for a decent selection of dry flies if you buy a half dozen. Rods run the usual range. He doesn’t discount aggressively, but he doesn’t gouge, and he’ll tell you honestly when something isn’t worth buying. That happens more often than you’d expect in a bait shop.
He’s open six days a week, closed Sundays, and generally in by six-thirty in the morning through trout season. Summer hours get a little looser. If you’re planning a first trip to Tuna Creek and you’ve never fished that water, the hour you spend talking to Earl before you go is worth more than most guidebooks. He’s not performing enthusiasm for the sport. He just actually knows the creek, and he’s willing to tell you what he knows.
