BETHEL — Sarah Lane and her fiancee, Jeremy Fredette, both of Albany Township, have accomplished a lot since Memorial Day 2013.

That day they opened Bethel Bait Tackle & More, a sporting goods and seafood retail store at 7 Mechanic St., they learned that it filled a needed niche rather well.

Business took off so much that the couple is expanding their 600-square foot building to 800 to 850 square feet by adding an addition next summer to accommodate tank storage for bait and lobsters.

They also own Western Maine Roofing and Siding in Business and are raising a son, Oliver, who is six years old. Fredette said he has 18 years of housing construction experience and will build the addition.

This May, Lane, 31, a wildlife artist, and Fredette, 36, won the Bethel Area Chamber of Commerce’s Rising Star Entrepreneur Award for Bethel Bait Tackle & More.

“They have used their combined talents to create a wonderful addition to our town,” Robin Zinchuk, executive director of the chamber, said in presenting the award.

“Jeremy brought his love of fishing and hunting — as well as the ‘sea’— to the business and, combined with Sarah’s amazing artistic talents, have made this eclectic shop a real attraction.”

The business will be featured on the History Channel’s “Downeast Dickering.”

“We traded a gun to cater a surf-n-turf lobster bake at Tony Bennett’s house,” Lane said. Bennett is the show’s lead character.

Bethel Bait Tackle & More provides consumers with products and services to enhance their recreational experiences within the local community and state. Its mission is to enable people to get outside and enjoy all of the natural resources that Maine’s wilderness has to offer.

It’s also a hunting and fishing license agent, a licensed game-tagging station and licensed bait dealer that sells live bait and fresh Maine lobster and seafood from the Maine coast.

The business hosts fishing derbies and whitetail buck pools and parties, and it sells hunting and fishing gear, wilderness art and handcrafted furniture.

Lane said they also provide connections to community resources, including local guides’ services, maps, Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife laws and more.

On Thursday afternoon, several customers stopped in to buy lobsters, swordfish, crabs, scallops and clams. They were greeted at the door by Leroy, the couple’s friendly golden retriever.

On finding the niche, Fredette said there really wasn’t anything like their store in Bethel and hasn’t been for years.

“We’re seafood lovers ourselves,” Lane said. “We would go down to the coast and we’d always get big crates of lobster for parties with our friends and crates of shrimp and we just knew it was something that was lacking.

“We also wanted to have a niche that would carry us through the slower seasons,” she said. “And lobster seemed to do all those things and was what people wanted whether it’s spring, summer, winter or fall. And then once we started selling lobster, we got requests for other kinds of seafood.

“So that’s why we started branching out and doing the varieties of seafood like the fish, the clams, chowders and quahogs.”

“That’s the ‘& More,'” Fredette said, laughing.

They buy their seafood in Damariscotta, Pemaquid and South Bristol, preferring to buy right off the boats of fishermen.

“Some people call us ‘the seafood market,’ some people call us ‘the gunshop,’ some people call us ‘the bait shop,’ and it all depends what people like that we have,” Lane said.

Fredette also shoots on a professional shooting team, Team Zespy, that is based in East Bethel, and has been a longtime hunter, hence the guns and ammunition part of the business.

During deer season, they run a buck pool for $10 a hunter and hold a party at the end of the season providing seafood and wild game. Last year, they had 150 hunters in the pool. This year’s event will be held on Dec. 16 for everyone in the buck pool.

“Last year, we had 20 pounds of cleaned lobster meat, 20 pounds of scallops wrapped in bacon, a ton of shrimp cocktail, moose burgers and deer burgers,” Fredette said.

They also raffle off guns. Since they’ve opened, they’ve sold 150 guns.

The couple rent their building from Lane’s aunt, Pok Sun Lane, who owns Cho Sun, a Bethel restaurant serving authentic Japanese and Korean cuisine and sushi, and Pok Sun Emporium, a home decor and jewelry store also in Bethel.

Lane said there hasn’t been a game tagging station in downtown Bethel for 20 years. With their digital scales and huge weigh station, they can also do moose.

She said business is so good that they’ve already done better this year than last year.

“There is clearly a demand for what we are doing,” she said.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

Bethel Bait Tackle & More is open from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. For more information, visit their website at www.BethelBait.com or call 207-824-4868.