The Chark
My dad, Mark Smith, was the Chark of CharkBait — a nickname an old work buddy gave him that stuck. Before fishing became the business, he spent years in consumer electronics working for firms like JVC and Sansui, then a decade teaching. When he became a private boater he ran into the same problem every private boater knows: finding fish isn't easy. So at the tail end of 1996 he started CharkBait as a place for private boaters to network — trip reports, radio traffic relayed to the fleet, honest information shared freely. It worked. The site got written up in the L.A. Times and the Orange County Register, and a community formed that's still with us today.
In 1997 he turned it into a real business, cashing in IRAs and leaning on credit cards to do something most internet retailers didn't bother with then (or now): actually stocking the gear. He liked to say that when it came to the internet, he was bigger than Bass Pro Shops — because he was online promoting saltwater fishing, and nobody else was. First it was a warehouse barn behind a shopping center, opened one day a month, with folks driving from San Diego and Santa Barbara to grab gear. Then every weekend. In 2001 we took over the small storefront in the Huntington National Shopping Center that nobody else could make work, and we're still there.
A family business, literally
In 2005 my dad traveled to Ukraine, met my mom, and brought us home to Huntington Beach. I started working weekends at the shop around 2010 — seventh grade — and the work and the community grew on me. My mom, Nadiya, joined the business running the office. I was partway through a computer engineering degree when our old FrontPage-era website finally gave out; I'd already built its replacement, and running it won out over finishing my last four classes. Dad got the thing he'd actually been building all along: a sustainable, family-run business, with the three of us working it together.