When Neal Cooke was 12 years old, he would take three- to four-day fishing trips to the Bahamas by himself.

“To me, that was epic,” he said. “That’s when I started being a fanatic.”

Then the preteen would return home to Florida, where he sold what he caught at local markets.

“My mom would drive me around with my cooler so I could sell them,” Cooke said.

Now the Loveland man has opened his own business, where he buys and sells saltwater fish from licensed vendors, guides saltwater fishing trips, leads walleye fishing trips on local waters and offers an all-you-can-eat sushi night every Saturday night at The Peaks Cafe in downtown Loveland.

“I just like the smell of the ocean and the sun and the warmth,” said Cooke, who opened Cooke’s Sea-food earlier this year. “And how happy people are. You get away from reality.”

Cooke started fishing as a 3-year-old with his grandfather in the Florida Keys. At 7, he caught a 27-pound mahi mahi, a catch that earned him a spot in a small Miami Herald story.

“There was no picture,” he said. “But I thought I was a celebrity.”

Cooke moved to Northern Colorado as a teenager, where he attended high school in Estes Park. He went to Colorado State University for college but always returned to Florida during breaks “to get my fishing fix,” he said.

He also worked in the mortgage industry for 12 years before opening Cooke’s Seafood, formerly known as Cooke’s Fisheries.

“I’m really particular about my eating habits and what I like for seafood,” he said.

“I could not find what I wanted here at a good price.”

He buys more than 50 exotic species — tuna jerky, smoked yellow tail, blue fish, and others — from licensed vendors around the country.

And he’s waiting for final approval from the Larimer County Department of Health and Environment to sell the fish he catches on saltwater fishing excursions.

Greg Starkey of Bellvue, who went in May with Cooke on a fishing trip south of San Diego, said he and a friend couldn’t go elk hunting this year and wanted to try something different.

“It’s not like fishing around here where you walk around a lake or troll in a boat,” said Starkey, who had never been deep-sea fishing before. “It’s bigger water, bigger boat, bigger fish. I though (the fish) were going to pull me in.”

Cooke’s business is filling a void for people in Northern Colorado who may have moved here from the places near the ocean and miss it, Cooke said.

Rose Iverson, co-owner of The Peaks Cafe, said the all-you-can-eat sushi nights she offers at her restaurant fill a niche downtown Loveland doesn’t have yet — even if construction is limiting the restaurant to groups of 10 or more who call for reservations.

“There are so many restaurants opening in downtown,” she said. “They seem to have just about everything except for sushi.”

And even people who have been landlocked their whole lives are starting to appreciate exotic fish once they get past their fear of preparing it, Cooke said.

“Once you learn,” he said, “it’s easier than cooking chicken.”