DUNEDIN, Fla. — Ultimately, if you don’t have bait, it’s tough to run a bait and tackle shop.

But, looking inside the murky water tank outside Angler 360 in Dunedin, employee Julian Ortiz doesn’t have that problem.

What You Need To Know

  •  Local bait and tackle shops are still recovering from Hurricanes Helene and Milton

  •  In Dunedin, Angler 360 employees say their shop got a foot and a half of water in the business

  •  As a result, they're renovating portions of the shop and expanding on some live bait spaces for their tanks

“We’ve got good shrimp right now,” he said, scooping some up from a tank.

Angler 360 has locations in Clearwater, but Ortiz said he spends most of his time working out of the Dunedin shop. For the last month, he said it’s been quite an experience.

“We've been trying, you know, get back and fully operational,” he said.

But that hasn’t been easy because of Hurricane Helene.

When that storm made landfall, Ortiz said more than a foot of water made its way into the shop.

“I was here the day after, and it was a mess," he said.

Everything on the ground and on the lower part of the walls had to be removed, and Ortiz said they lost freezers, coolers and pumps to tanks.

Still, that hasn’t stopped them from doing whatever possible to keep the place running.

Not only do they still have the shrimp tanks outside, but Ortiz said they’re working on expanding a live bait area that was damaged from the storm.

“We’re going to have fiddler crabs here; we’re going to have all our freshwater tanks right here,” Ortiz said while showing around the back portion of the shop. “So, a little bit of everything.”

He said Helene was the only real problem for the shop. Milton took off some gutters, according to Ortiz, but the business was fine otherwise.

Ortiz said the immediate problem after the storms was getting people to come out and shop.

“The first, you know, couple weeks, it was definitely really slow,” Ortiz said. “But now, I mean, as you can see, we're definitely getting a lot more business.”