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Serena Yerg is the female force running Buckshot’s Bait and Tackle
It’s 4:45 in the morning and the sun has yet to suggest it will cut through that night sky on the eastern horizon to break open another summer day on Lake Erie.
But, surrounded by all of the darkness and the somewhat ominous quiet, Serena Yerg has plenty to be excited about. As the owner/operator of Buckshot’s Bait & Tackle shop, she will soon be greeting groups of fishermen with a smile and an optimistic outlook for the day ahead.
“Running a bait shop – every day is completely different from yesterday, and today will be different than tomorrow,” said the 27-year-old Anthony Wayne graduate, who is known as “Buckshot” to legions of area fishermen. “But I always come in here excited about everything and confident our fishermen will do well. I’m here to help make that happen.”
The job doesn’t just require that she string together an endless chain of 15-hour days, schedule daily deliveries of live bait, maintain an inventory of tackle for a wide variety of uses, keep the store’s website up to date, sell fishing and hunting licenses, and run a very busy fish cleaning operation out of the same building. Yerg is also called on numerous times each day to provide accurate, detailed information on where the fish are biting and what the preferred baits and methods of catch are – a constantly changing and highly valuable arc of intel.
“Being a woman and running this type of business — it can be a challenge at times, because a lot of times people come in and they don’t think I am the owner,” she said. “Some of the older gentlemen have a bit of a harder time taking my advice, so I’ve gotten used to them doing a second glance when they learn that’s my name on the building.”
She received the “Buckshot” nickname from Mario Campos, the owner of Maumee Tackle Fishing Outfitters, while she was working for Campos and helping run his stores in Maumee and Grand Rapids. There’s no clever background or cute story behind it – Campos just tagged her with the moniker, and it stuck. She’s Buckshot.
Campos owned Yerg’s current business for a couple of years before selling it to her in January. The site is the former Butch & Denny’s Bait Shop on Corduroy Road east of Toledo, and very close to Lake Erie.
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“That is one of the things that attracted me to this place – the fact it had that long history since Butch & Denny’s had been around for about 75 years and had this strong foundation with the fishing community already in place,” she said. “That legacy was here, and I felt the opportunity to build on that legacy was just an awesome thing.”
Yerg, who earned a degree in supply chain management from Miami University in 2021, had been working for Campos at his bait shops since she was 16, and returned to that role full-time after college.
“I found out that the fishing industry is where I wanted to be,” said Yerg, who gained a love of the outdoors from fishing and hunting with her father Ken. “Being in the fishing business — I like the people, I like the pace, and now I love being my own boss. I’m not the only woman running a bait shop, but I like showing that we can do the job and do it well.”
