Fishermen like to say that fishing isn’t really about the fish. It’s about the waiting. The fight. Finding peace out on the water.

And getting “away from all the wackos.”

That’s how Tony Tochterman, proprietor of Tochterman’s Fishing Tackle in Fells Point, thinks about it. Tony, who inherited the Eastern Avenue shop from his father Tommy, who inherited it from his father Thomas, once traveled the world fishing. He has little time for such adventures today, but that doesn’t bother him. His first love was always the store.

“I love tackle,” Tochterman said while spooling reel in his shop recently. “Anything to do with the reels and the rods. Anything to do with business.”

A long list of influential customers have passed through Tochterman’s.

William Donald Schaefer, the Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor, shopped here. Retired Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski (“Babs,” to Tony) has been coming since she was a girl. An autographed baseball in the display case dedicated to Tommy Tochterman came from Ted Williams, the legendary Red Sox player and avid fly fisherman, who frequented the shop when his team visited Baltimore.

Since Thomas George Tochterman Sr. opened the shop in 1916, the Chesapeake Bay has seen tremendous change. A century of industrial and agricultural pollution has degraded the watershed, and its beloved striped bass, crabs and oysters have been harvested to record lows.

Yet Tochterman’s has remained more or less the same. Rods arch over the aisles, nets hang from the walls and multi-colored lures are stocked like candy.

“There’s places in this building, there’s shelves we haven’t touched in 20 years,” Tony said.

He claims to run the world’s oldest family-owned tackle shop operating in its original location. In February, Tochterman’s turns 110, outlasting fishing fad and fashion.

In recent decades, Tony has run Tochterman’s alongside his wife Dee. They met at an Eastern Shore party in the early ’90s, and Dee said they’ve hardly been apart since. The pair chirp at each other like a sitcom couple. With his thick Baltimore accent, Tony calls his customers “hon” and seems to add a “goddamn” to every other sentence.

Among local anglers, the family name is synonymous with their sport — one friend pronounces it “Tackleman” — and, in the world of fly fishing, this shop is hallowed ground.

A display case against Tochterman’s back wall is a shrine to the history of American recreational fishing, filled with vintage reels, lures and tournament badges. A black-and-white photo shows Tony’s grandfather beneath a sign advertising his new store: “Tochtermann’s,” spelled with an extra N. Descended from German immigrants, the family dropped a letter in a show of patriotism during World War I.

Also behind the glass: two rod cases housing the ashes of Tony’s parents, Tommy and Antoinette.

Mom-and-pop shops like Tochterman’s already face pressure from Amazon and big-box stores like Bass Pro Shops, and declines in the bay’s prized rockfish only make their business models harder, said David Sikorski, director of the Maryland chapter of the Coastal Conservation Association. Sikorski, who considers Tony a mentor, said four of barely a dozen independent tackle shops have closed in Maryland since the pandemic.

Tochterman’s is the “friggin’ foundation” of this industry, Sikorski said.

“I love sitting on a stool and just watching the fabric of recreational angling walking in the door,” he said.

Eric Brown, a dockworker who stopped in looking for flies, first visited Tochterman’s only a week earlier.

“Now I can’t stay out of the place,” he said.

Brown got lost in the upstairs fly collection and Tony ribbed him when he finally emerged.

“You’re here so goddamn much, he told me to get you a time card,” Tony said.

Over the years, a mutual loyalty has formed between Tochterman’s and its customers. For example, in the 1990s, a customer walked into Tochterman’s with a long-forgotten gift certificate found in his late father’s desk. The date read 1947; Tony accepted it.

Years earlier, Tony fielded a call from Lyn Meyerhoff, daughter-in-law of the Baltimore philanthropist, who was passing through the Panama Canal en route to California. (“A great fisherman,” Tony recalled. “Not a good fisherman. A great fisherman.”)

She needed two new rods, and Tony promised to get them direct to her boat. She invited him to tag along.

“I’m fishing with Ronnie,” Meyerhoff told him, meaning then-President Ronald Reagan. Overwhelmed, Tony declined.

Of their many devoted customers, perhaps none left their mark like the fly fisherman called “the greatest of all time.” About 80 years ago, Joe Brooks, a Baltimore native considered the father of modern fly fishing, introduced a young Bernard Kreh to the Fells Point store.

Known to most as “Lefty,” Kreh revolutionized modern fly casting, the Babe Ruth of his sport, “but even bigger.” Kreh and Tony fished together across the world. He recalls one trip they took to Belize with Chico Fernandez, another famed angler. Tony had never been someplace so remote, and Kreh and Fernandez had him sleep on their boat’s deck.

“That’s where I was introduced to the stars,” Tony said.

By the time Kreh died in 2018, he was a dear friend.

“You two are like family to me,” Kreh wrote to Tony and Dee in 2016. “As a ‘second dad,’ I’m so proud and only wish there were more Americans like you two.”

In recent years, the store retired a customer favorite: Dee’s famous blood worms, irresistible bait to most saltwater fish.

For 30-plus years, Dee sifted through worms all day — as many as 30,000 a week — washing them in saltwater, draining them in a spaghetti strainer and earning her the nickname “Worm Girl.”

Though price increases pushed Tochterman’s to discontinue blood worms, Dee still wears her title proudly — even if she laments that some now call her “Worm Lady.”

Others on Tochterman’s staff bring their own specialties. David McCollum and Tim Campbell are certified Maryland “Master Anglers” — the second and fifth people to earn that honor — Cody Rugemer is the shop’s fly fishing wiz, and Marcko Duclayan is an expert at fishing, of all places, the Baltimore harbor (over four nights in early September, he caught 74 striped bass off the promenade).

Despite illusions of timelessness, signs of a new era show at the East Avenue shop.

Tony and Dee intended to retire after their store’s centennial but haven’t gotten around to it. In recent years, they’ve pared back to five days a week (Under Tony’s father, Tochterman’s basically never closed; it opened its doors at 5:00 a.m. and closed them at 11:00 p.m., seven days a week, including holidays).

Recently, neon lights on the iconic sign above the front door, a leaping large-mouth bass installed in 1938, burned out.

The Tochtermans have no children and insist they’d sooner close for good than sell to someone who doesn’t uphold their commitment to customers.

Neither Tony nor Dee seems too anxious about the neon lights, which will be fixed, or the shop’s future. As on the water, the world turns a little slower in their store.

“If you have pressure on you when you’re fishing,” Tony said, “you’re in the wrong goddamn sport.”