Owner sells tackle shop, but still can't spit the hook

BELMONT — For years, Alan Nute heard about the best fishing spots in the region. He passed that information along to whoever asked, but he didn’t get to use it himself as much as he would have liked, because he was busy running A.J.’s Bait and Tackle in Meredith.

He sold the retail shop in November of last year, but he’s still just as invested in the fishing business – but in a capacity that ought to take him out on the water instead of just talking about it. Nute has reinvented himself as a part-time lure manufacturer, and part-time fishing guide, continuing an unlikely but continuous career path that started with his teenage years, when he took a job as a runner for an auction house.

Nute grew up in Merrimack, and got his first job as one of the dozens of runners for Zyla’s Auction House. When one of the family members left the auction business to start a retail operation, Nute went with him to learn about merchandising.

It was through the retail store that Nute, who learned to fish at a family camp on Bear Island, got into the craft of making fishing lures.

“I was taught my first fly in Franklin,” Nute said. He was in his later 20s, maybe even 30 years old, when a Zyla’s customer offered to show him how to tie bits of feather onto a hook in such a way as to fool a trout.

By then, he was an avid fisherman, spending most mornings before work with a rod in his hand. In 1997, it made sense that someone like him should buy Waldron’s, a family-run fishing supply store in business on Meredith’s Main Street since the 1950s.

He found his fishing lifestyle “reversed,” he said, spending more of his time at work so that other people could go fishing.

That situation changed last year, when he accepted an offer to sell his business to The Tackle Shack, which moved his stock to a storefront in the Hannaford shopping plaza. Nute, in turn, bought out a couple of other small New England lure manufacturers and set up operations in his basement.

Over the winter, he has manufactured more than 1,000 lures, and has promoted his guide service, A.J.’s Great Spirit Fishing Charters. His new plan is intended to get him back to his old ways.

“I hope to be on the water every morning,” he said.

Fishing beckons for Nute, as it has for every angler who will dust off their tackle box this weekend, if they haven’t already, as the open water fishing season is now underway in New Hampshire. What keeps Nute going back isn’t so much the excitement of the big catches, he said, as what happens in between.

“The relaxation, being out on the water, it’s peaceful most of the time,” he said.

And then there’s the enduring challenge of learning more about fish and the world they live in; the dance of the animal and the environment.

“Nobody knows it all,” said Nute, adding that he has learned a lot from talking with his more experienced customers over the years. A fish’s behavior can differ based on the time of day, time of year, phase of the moon, whether it’s sunny or rainy, or the barometric pressure. “You pay attention,” and learn, he said.

How does that knowledge translate to fishing lures? Nute said a lure will tempt a fish if it looks, to the fish, like the bait they’re feeding on at the time.

Along with the manufacturing equipment he acquired from the lure companies he bought, Nute has a stock of old lure components for designs that date back to the 1930s. Fish haven’t changed much, he said, though these lures look different from what’s currently on shelves. He’s thinking of bringing some of those designs back, he said.

“Everything cycles, clothing, you name it,” Nute said. Lures aren’t any different. Old styles get left behind, for no good reason other than they’re familiar. “New things come out and people go crazy about it.”

He’s also working on some of his own designs, and he knows from his experiences as a tackle shop owner that a good lure has to work on more than one species.

“You’ve got to catch the customer’s eye to catch the customer, but you’ve got to catch the fish to have repeat customers,” he said.