Do you Advertise? The only time I advertise is in that fish finder magazine 6 months out of the year. March through September that’s when everybody fishes.
Have you got any feedback fromanybody today? I had guys going out to a farm pond but I haven’t seen any of them come back and I had some guys going to Michigan up towards the straights ice fishing. They came in to buy spikes and wax worms.
They didn’t buy any mousses? No, the guys went over to Keiser Lake when the ice was on, one guy told me his buddies had wax worms and spikes, and he had mousses, and the only thing he caught them perch on was mousses. He said they were nice big ones, so fat when you pick them up the eggs run out of them because they’re spawning.
Are they? Oh yeah! Perch spawn underneath the ice, just as the ice is going off. February is the month that perch spawn. The next thing to spawn will be Pike in March. That’s way up the lake when they come in to the channels, and when the water is up they swim right up in your front yard. They come into the cricks to spawn. They catch a lot of them over there at the RR trestle, and at the golf course where the dam is at up there.
How many minnows do you go through in a week? Well last winter I was probably going through fifty pounds a week. They were using them right here around the trestle for Saugeye, mainly using shiners and chubs.
So a Saugeye will bite a shiner? Oh yeah, definitely, that or a chub either one. The cheap guys will buy bass minnows. Its $6.50 or $7.00 a dozen for chubs and they’ll pay $1.50 for bass minnows. I’ve seen guys put two bass minnows on a hook at the same time instead of one big sucker chub. I sell a lot of goldfish for catfish around the pay lakes. They don’t use many of them on the river here.
It’s all pay lake fishing with them goldfish. Then they use them skip jacks. They’re kept frozen like shad. Some call them a “River Herring”. Pay lakes are selling one Skip Jack minnow for $7.00. I’ve been running them out of here for $2.50 a piece. I tell them, yeah, you get down there to the pay lake; you’ll pay $7.00 for this one. These come out of Alabama that’s where they come from. The guy catches them on the Mississippi river and he won’t come up here for less than 1000. He puts ten of them in a bag and brings 100 bags.
Frozen? Yep! That guy at the pay lake is making a killing. We bought them for a $1.00 a piece and he’s selling them for $7.00.
How long will a crawdad live? Boy that’s something, you got me over a barrel there. I would say in the neighborhood of not more than five years. I’d take 500 dozen soft craws to a guy named Bill Bruins on Wolf Creek road, then take 500 dozen to Lawrence at Anglers Bait shop in Englewood. Lawrence wanted to buy all I had so Bill couldn’t get any. He would get up on the back of the truck to root around to see if I had anymore. I told him if I caught him up on the truck again I wouldn’t sell him anymore bait. Those were the good ole days.
I hauled crawls out of Indiana because they couldn’t get the price out of them in Indiana what you could in Ohio. I’d get a dollar more a dozen in Ohio. I always used that for a leverage bar. If you want soft crawls you buy minnows, night crawlers, and everything else off me. I ain’t giving you the gravy without the potatoes! Yep! It was a leverage bar. Nobody else had them see. Once in a while some guys would go out and catch a few and take them to a dealer to sell, but within two or three days those dealers were out again.
I had an old man in here that was 70 some years old. He came over here and seen me, he was from Columbus and said he would catch me all the crawls I wanted. When he left, I laughed and thought that old man don’t know didly beans and another guy came in from Columbus and said “I’m gonna tell you what Joe, don’t let your mouth overload your butt”. I said what? He said “Yes sir! That old boy is liable to show up here tomorrow with a 1,000 dozen, you watch”! That whole summer, he would back in here at 4 in the afternoon with 200-500 dozen every day. Yep! Every day! And he also caught crawls for some women in Columbus. I paid that guy $40,000 that year. He worked by himself and all he had was a minnow seine and he bought the gas and that was it. All the guys that worked here ran up to him trying to find out where he went. He just laughed and said “Boys you’ll learn that the same way I did. When I go to the grave it’s all going with me”. Every crawdad he brought in here would shed in two days. They weren’t hard craws. He went through and picked the peelers out. Every craw he brought, he knew how to tell. He had been doing it for 50 years.
It’s the color? Yep! The color.
You said something about running trucks and hauling fish… how many people did you have working for you? When I was in Indiana I had 4 trucks on the road and a dozen people working.
Were you buying and selling? Yep! The soft craws we shed ourselves. We bought the hard crawls and then fed them and shed them. Buy them out of the north-country because you can’t get enough of them out of the cricks around here anymore. You have to have the right temperature of the water and the right stuff to feed them. The only reason they shed they’re shell is they outgrow it. Everybody says it’s a full moon when they shed but that’s not true it’s a myth. It’s the temperature of the water and how much they got to eat. One crick might shed on a ¼ moon so go back there on the next month on a ¼ moon and they’ll shed again. If it’s on a ½ moon when you find them, go back there on a ½ moon the next month.
So it’s about a month? Yes, you only have a few months while they shed; April May, June, and July. By August they’re breeding and when you see them on top of each other it’s time to quit. There getting ready to go down in the mud. I didn’t know that. The ones I buy up north they shed in April on the right year and I’ve seen them on the 7th day of April shed but usually it’s around the 23rd when you see those lilac bushes blooming, you can figure soft crawls are ready. The ones out of Minnesota don’t shed until a couple days after Memorial Day. So I use these craws around here first then bring a load in from up there.
What about prices? They’re $6.95 a dozen. At Lake Erie they’re getting $8.00 to $10.00. They’re not getting the good crawls they’re getting the pond crawls. A little grey looking crawl, they’re not the river crawl that everybody wants. Yeah, you want the brownish green looking ones. They catch those dudes out of them sleuths up there. They are a transparent looking crawl. Now see when a crawl is real little… a baby one, he’ll shed every two or three weeks cause he’s growing. You keep growing you have to keep shedding.
What do you sell night crawlers for now? $2.12 a dozen. I’ve been at $2.12 for 5 years. 
What was the price when you first started? Oh probably $1.00 a dozen. I get night crawlers in 50 or a 100 thousand at a time. They come out of Canada. I can pick up the phone and in two days they’ll be here. In fact I just picked up some; they’ll be here at 7:00 in the morning.
How old are you Joe? 67.
Do you love the bait business? Oh yeah! Or I wouldn’t be in it and it’s the only thing I know. Yeah, I worked 18 years in foundries, pouring iron. Then the last five years I was in the foundry, I was running wholesale bait and working there at night and finally it got to be too much. I told my wife I’m telling you right now one of these jobs has got to go. She said well which one do you want to quit? I said you know which one, and I was a Union Steward and everything else.
When I took over that bait business I told them my day was coming. The last 4 years I bid down into the UPS end of it, down in the warehouse. I wanted to learn all about shipping so I could ship bait. I packed orders and ran the scale and you have to know which labels to put on, blue label for this or that, some going air freight, some going regular pickup.
What about shipping Minnows? We put them in one of those plastic bags with oxygen. I’ve got oxygen here, I can put 5 pounds of minnows in a bag and shoot the oxygen to it, and away they go with it. When the boys leave here they usually have 150 to 200 pounds of minnows on to go to Springfield or Indian lake. I used to go to the Ohio River, Portsmouth, and almost to Lake Erie. It’s a real job. You have to come in and drain water off, fill them up the next morning, put the minnows on, and away we go again. Then you got to put ice on them about half-way through the day to keep that water temperature down. You can’t add too much ice at a time or you’ll shock them. Anybody can handle worms, but minnows are tricky. If you let the aerator quit, or the truck breaks down, you lose the whole load. At one time I had 125 carry outs I took care of. When I was in Marion Indiana on the Salimony Reservoir I had 450 bait stores I took care of, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan.
You raise your own chubs? No we pick and buy them out of the north and some out of Arkansas. I buy mostly sucker chubs anymore out of Minnesota I call and tell them to bring me 25 gallons and that’s 400 pounds, when they get here, five minutes later they are unloaded and gone.
What are the blue swimming pools out back for? Those are for crawls.
Do they have anything in them now? That’s what I used to keep minnows in the back.
What is all that stuff you have out back? Those are crawl tanks. When I had them all running, I had the biggest crawl business in the United States.
Is that right? Yeah it wasn’t nothing to have 2,000 dozen on the truck and leave here, then within 3 or 4 hrs I’d be back with all of them gone.
So you were selling retail to other bait shops? Wholesale, I remember they used to sell them for 1.50 a dozen.
So nobody isn’t doing that anymore? How come? All the guys got out of it there ain’t no money in it anymore.
Are you making any money on it? Oh yeah. The crawls are hard to get with this stupid weather we have. At one time there in Piqua, I had 65 guys picking crawls for me. Uh huh! Uh huh! Wow!
What would they bring you at a time 10-20 dozen? Some guys would bring me 200 dozen. In them days I paid 1.50 a dozen and sell them for 2.00 a dozen and make 400 dollars and only be gone a couple hours.
It won't be long I’ll have to get crickets and all that here. The middle of March we’ll be running.
Do you sell a lot of crickets? In the summertime I do.
What will bite crickets? Blue gills. They use a lot of them at Keiser Lake. Down south in Kentucky to Florida dealers will sell 50,000 crickets a week, but up in this country, it never really took off, red worms and wax worms up here. That’s all they sell in the south is red worms they call “wigglers” and crickets for bluegill fishing and shell-crackers too. They claim that you can smell them shell-crackers when there spawning. They get back in the sleuths and down in around the cypress trees. The great big bluegills are lousy (plentiful) in there. I love bluegills and smallmouths. Those are two of my favorite fish. I like to catch rock bass too. Where I caught a lot of Rock Bass was in Canada. They catch some of them here in the river. I told the guys to get me a Rock Bass about like that (hand size) because I want to get it mounted. Most people don’t know what they are. Some call them a “Red Eye” and others call them a “Google Eye”
How long have you been in the bait Business Joe? Since 1972.
Where did you start out at? Celina, I ran a bait store up there. I had the biggest bait store on the lake up there. After 22 years, me and my wife got a divorce.
Is that why you moved? Yep, I had the marina at Windy Point and a couple miles right down the road I had some home tanks and a bait store there too. I couldn’t run both of them by myself. So I just locked both of them up and come to Piqua at the Shawnee bridge and started another one trying to get my wife back. I got the business going good and then I found out she was going with some other guy so I left town. That was in 1982 or 1983.
When are you going to retire? I’m about ready.
What are you going to do when you retire, go back to fishing? Yep! That’s what I figure on doing.
Ryan’s Bait Farm -2017 County Rd 25A, Troy, Ohio 45373.
Phone (937-335-0083)
Hours of operation 7am-7pm open seven days a week.
Delana S. Oaks
