Sag Harbor's Tight Lines Tackle To Cut Bait, Move to Southampton Village

Tight Lines Tackle, which has served recreational fishermen from the Sag Harbor area for more than 20 years, will move to Southampton Village next month.

“I’m going to try to pack up and be out between October 7 and 10,” said Kenny Morse, who has run the business out of a side building at the Sag Harbor Yacht Yard on Bay Street since 2001.

His new store will be at 260 Hampton Road in Southampton Village, next to Ted’s Market.

Morse said he would miss the customers who stream into his small shop to pick up a rod-and-reel combo, a couple of lures, or just to share a little fishing news, but that he hoped his new shop would be close enough so he could continue to serve his existing clientele while giving him access to more year-round traffic.

“Honestly, I believe one door closes and another door opens,” he said. “The thing about Bay Street that is difficult is that it is very quiet in the off-season. If you think about a marina in the winter, once your boat is wrapped for the season, there is no reason to come back until springtime.”

In his new location, Morse said he expected to see a more steady flow of customers nine months of the year. While Sag Harbor is busier in the summer, it gets so crowded that many customers don’t come in as often as they used to, he said.

Moving in early October would have once meant pulling up stakes at the busiest time of the year when striped bass could usually be counted on for a sustained run along the ocean beaches as they headed south for the winter. But that’s not necessarily the case any longer, Morse said.

“If we go back 30 years, I’d say so,” he said, “but the fall has changed so much. The fall run happens a little later in the year, and the later the fall run happens, the more people are out of the area.”

Morse, the son of two physicians, grew up in Riverdale in the Bronx, but his parents bought a house on Moriches Bay in Westhampton. It was a time of abundance, Morse said, with the bay bottoms practically paved with clams, crabs and fish.

“I preferred being out here,” he said. “I always hated as a kid having to leave Westhampton and go back to the city.”

Morse spent two years at Southampton College before completing his education at Unity College in Maine, where he received a bachelor’s degree in ecology with an emphasis in marine biology. After college, he worked for a time at the Morton Wildlife Refuge in Noyac before landing a job as manager of the tackle department at the Bayview Seafood Market, which is now a house owned by Billy Joel.

When Bayview closed its doors at the end of 2000, Morse bought the inventory and moved down the block and across the street.

Like any small business, Morse has to keep a large inventory on hand to match the sometimes overnight changes in the demands of fishermen. And like many other small businesses, he has to struggle with online competition.

“What’s painful is when someone literally says to my face, ‘Oh, they have that on Amazon for $30 less,’” said Morse.

Customers who want to remain on Morse’s good side know better than to mention the “A” word in his presence. “They don’t sell bait, they don’t give you advice, they don’t help you put line on your reel, and they don’t show you knots,” he said. “That’s why you come to me.”

Morse said he would have stayed put in Sag Harbor, despite its challenges, if his landlord would have given him a multi-year lease. Howard Lorber, the head of Douglas Elliman real estate, and Herman Goldsmith, who owns a series of luxury car dealerships up-island, owned the yacht yard and would only give him year-to-year deals, which Morse said left him with no choice but to look for a more permanent home.

Ironically, last June, Lorber and Goldsmith sold the property, and the new owner offered Morse a lease — but he said he had already agreed to rent the new space in Southampton Village.