Bait & Switch -- In A Ballard Shop, Herring, Lattes And Jazz Make For A Serendipitous Business

At dawn on the western edge of Ballard, when the lights from shore stretch golden across the water, the first customer of the day paddles up to the Bait House Coffee Shop and honks for his food.

He has orange webbed feet. He wants half a loaf of dark rye bread, torn. He wants it now.

"Huey! Oh, Huey!" Sharon Relei leans her string mop against the upright piano, slides open the cafe door and steps into the cold creosote air. She tosses beak-size bites to the sassy white goose and his Canadian girlfriend, Daisy, a wild mottled bird with a bum wing. Huey and Daisy are an odd couple. They are regulars at Relei's quirky coffee shop and not a bit out of character.

Soon will come the salmon fishers in red suspenders and hip waders, looking to buy drip coffee and fresh herring for bait. Then the latte crowd with tasseled loafers and the sales reps with their laptop computers and the retirees who have been awake since 3:30 a.m. and the regulars who retired a little sooner than they wanted and the social worker looking for soup and some peace and the psychologist wanting to talk about his divorce and the university student with great hair and the barber whose fuchsia fingernails match her eye shadow and sweater and socks.

Bait and jazz

They come all day and all week and finally, on Friday and Saturday nights, there is jazz. Charlie Parker. Miles Davis. Standards. An alto sax, a double bass, a plinky-plunk upright piano jamming loose and loopy, packed in tight with fishing tackle and double-tall mochas and diners slurping cracked crab. Behind the counter, the dishwasher steams into Relei's auburn hair as she twists a bread bag closed. She looks glamorous tonight, a little like a blues singer with smoky eyes, swaying side-to-side on the rubber grid mats, face flushed from the glow of a red neon sign.

This is a place you won't find anywhere else. It is a tackle store and sandwich shop and jazz joint, but mostly it is a personality. It is the character of 43-year-old Sharon Relei and the spirit of her late mother, Vera. Twelve tables and an upright piano in the back of a bait shop. A dinky bistro holding its own along a strip of waterfront restaurants with huge paved parking lots.

The Bait House does not have a Web site or corporate headquarters. No stock splits. No designer-theme decor. There is a small silver-and-blue pinwheel on top of the Snapple cooler and an oscillating fan to make it spin. There is a blue heron drying her wings on a ragged piling by the dock. There is a life-size mug shot - in the bathroom - of a 38-inch, 30-pound Chinook salmon hooked with live bait purchased here.

The Bait House is everything Sharon Relei wants it to be and nothing more. "I do it because I love it here," Relei says. "My mom loved it here. It's a good comforting feeling for me to be here. This is my relationship with my mom, and the people who come in here. I treat them like they're cousins. That's why customers bus their own tables. They feel like they're part of this place."

Vera's spirit

Do not be alarmed if you see her, over there, by the sliding ice-cream freezer, a tall woman with piercing blue eyes, four diamonds in each ear, an arm of gold bangles, angular cheekbones, frosty buzz cut. She is Relei's mother, Vera. She died a few years ago, 60 years old, from a brain tumor, but she still visits; many of the regulars have seen her.

By all accounts, Vera Relei is the spirit behind the bait at the Bait House. She was a fierce woman who was fanatic about salmon fishing, which means she got furious when she could not get bait. This happened fairly often; bait suppliers in those days were not a consistent bunch. So, 15 years ago, when Seattle real estate was not so pricey, Vera and her husband bought a little house on a scrap of land at the mouth of Shilshole Bay, and started their own bait business.

"Oh, man," remembers her husband, Dan Relei, who had been a butcher and dabbler in fix-up properties. "What do I know about bait? Nothing! Next thing I know, I'm up at the boat yard building a dock." Next thing after that, he was out with his son in their new-used 42-foot purse seiner, scooping up bait balls with brail nets the size of small cafe tables. Ballard Bait and Tackle grew into a half-million dollar-a-year business that shipped frozen herring - 4 million of them! - to Alaska, British Columbia, Oregon, California and the Great Lakes states. On August mornings, at 4 a.m., the line for fresh bait would be 100 anglers deep, boat trailers and pickups idling on the gravel strip along Seaview Avenue Northwest. One thousand dozen herring sold out before 6 a.m.

Through it all, Vera continued to fish. She'd cast off of the dock from a certain special spot, surrounded by her tubs of cymbidium orchids and fragrant roses. She hated to be disturbed while fishing, her daughter recalls. "If anyone came up with a boat to fish, she'd scream: `What the . . . are you doing? There's a line out there!' "

Taking stock

It was difficult to watch such a strong person die. A woman who could do everything, anything, now needed her daughter's help in the bathroom. Vera could no longer run the shop. It had been her idea to do coffee and pastries but by the time the espresso machine came, she was too sick. Sharon, who had been a full-time soccer mom up to then, began filling in at the Bait House. Fortunately, Vera had already taught her daughter a little about the business and a lot about life. Sharon's mother never made it past the seventh grade, but she knew the ways of the world.

Sharon: "My mom had basic general rules: You don't cheat people. You give people a good product. If they're not happy, you give them their money back."

There was also the lesson of the tattoo. Vera had always wanted a tattoo, so one night, close to the end, after they had watched "Wheel of Fortune" together, Sharon turned to her mother and asked, "Mom, is there anything you want to do that you haven't done?"

Vera sat in her brown recliner, thinking. "Nothing," she said.

"That's what I want when I die," Sharon realized. "That's where I need to be."

Sharon went through with her divorce. She decided to work full time at the Bait House. And on the first anniversary of her mother's death, she got a hummingbird tattooed on her ankle.

Sharon's father, too, took stock: "You never know when the guy upstairs is gonna say: Hey! Lights out, baby!" He decided to travel all over the world and leave the bait business to his son and daughter. Last June, Sharon's brother realized his heart wasn't in herring, either.

"So it's me," Sharon says. Her first job was to win over the crusty customers who creaked in the door at 5 in the morning.

"They'd start talking about how they knew the last owners, and I'd go: `Uh-huh.'

"They'd go: `Those people were so rude and crabby!'

"Yeah, I know," Sharon would smile. "That's my mom and dad. I grew up with them." The lure of herring

To catch salmon, you need herring. "You can fiddle around with rubber worms and all that other hokey stuff," Sharon's father explains, "but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if herring is what they're used to eating, that's what you feed them."

Getting the herring on the hook is more complicated. In the Bait House, on the counter above the tackle, there are cut-plug charts that diagram the process in hand-drawn detail. Before you grab one, look around for the 78-year-old salt in red suspenders who has a mini screwdriver poking out of his flannel pocket. D.C. Wood is almost always around, has been around, and he can explain.

Don't plunk frozen bait straight in the water, unless you want it to explode. Thaw it.

Use a standard 6-foot nylon leader, unless you go out to Point No Point, where you should use 10 feet because of the way the current runs. Mooch by sinking your line to the bottom and reeling it back up. Or drag the bait behind a boat and let the motor do the work. Either way, you need weights. You can add a dodger, which looks like a sparkly shoehorn, to sidewash through the water, or a flasher, which has a slightly different curve, to circle around and around.

The bigger the salmon, the bigger the bait. Right now, try 6-inch herring, the package with the green label, dozen for $2.89. In August, when the salmon run 25 to 35 pounds, you'll want 9-inch herring, six for $3.15. Don't use fresh bait unless it's been starved for 10 days because the gut will make the scales pop off. There is no fresh bait now. No one has it. This is January. There has never been fresh bait in January. Frozen is fine. Look at these herring, pearly, perfect, like silver bullets. This is how you catch salmon.

Luring customers is another matter. Sharon has no master plan. She does not advertise. She opens half an hour before dawn (that's 4 a.m. in summer, 7 a.m. in winter) to sell bait to early morning fishers. When fresh-bait sales slacked due to restrictions on salmon fishing, she added sandwiches and soup to the menu. She bought an upright piano because the place felt like it needed one, and leaves the keyboard lid open, always, so people will sit down and play. Musicians from Cornish College of the Arts wandered in and said they'd like to play a gig; they've been back every weekend since.

The kayakers slurp hot chocolate. The octogenarians cycle down from Bothell, wearing Spandex. The retirement-home ladies lunch on crab sandwiches and glasses of chardonnay; they always call ahead to say they're coming. The old-timers remember when bait was 35 cents a dozen, back when Ray's was a little shack with rowboats, back about the time Will Rogers died. The social worker from the welfare office sits on the deck, even when it's cold, to watch gulls swoop and dive and hear the trawlers' low drone. "My daily stress break," she calls it. "Mini-vacation."

"Therapeutic," the psychologist says.

Nobody seems disturbed about dining, well, in a bait shop. "Doesn't bother me," says a woman munching a roast beef sandwich. "I don't eat seafood."

"The people who come here don't like the big corporate thing," Sharon says. "They don't want to go to Starbucks. They don't want to go to places like Ray's where someone with a little starched shirt hovers over them. They just want to relax and be themselves."

She hustles over to a table of older ladies wearing pastel pantsuits. They've been waiting 15 minutes to order. "Well, I'm having hot flashes today and can't even focus," she says. They nod. Life is like that. Besides, the social worker tells her, "They're not hot flashes in the '90s. They're power surges."

Sharon laughs. Her mother would have, too.