Tyler Nonn: Tidewater Charters
Tyler Nonn is a creature of the Chesapeake. Like many of the Bay’s rockfish, he grew up around the Susquehanna Flats; he’s adapted to its changing waters, just like the drum and cobia that he now targets; and like an osprey, he heads to southern fisheries in the winter before migrating back to his Chesapeake haunts in the spring.
““The Chesapeake red drum and the speckled trout fishery right now is absolutely bananas.” ”
Tyler is constantly on the move from season-to-season finding the peak times to target various species. His guiding season for Tidewater Charters starts in the late spring with red drum and cobia, which leads into late-summer speckled trout and late-fall rockfish, and then he hits the Keys in the winter for tarpon and sailfish before repeating the cycle each spring.
One of the challenging parts of guiding this way is knowing when it’s time to shift to the next season, and Tyler keeps a close eye on subtle environmental cues in the Bay. This attention to the bay’s elements over time has given him an appreciation for the health -- or relative lack thereof -- of some of its keystone fisheries.
I caught up with Tyler on a late spring evening recently to hear more about his four-season approach, some of the stories of the good old days of cow rockfish, and a dose of good news about some of the fish that are thriving. Below are my questions in bold, followed by his answers.
52 Week Season: You are known for following the best fishing from the mid-Atlantic to Florida and back. When does your season in the Chesapeake region begin?
Tyler Nonn: Traditionally, the start of my season would be at the very end of March when water temperatures were in the upper ‘40s. You’d get a big south wind and some big tides on a moon phase and get some fish moving out of the lower reaches of the bay and the ocean and start doing their spawning thing.
I grew up in the upper bay and as soon as we saw herring or shad pushing in the creek next to my dad’s house, we knew the stripers were right behind. You can see other environment cues too like gannets sitting in the main stem.
I did that for 10 years but in my last couple of rockfish seasons, it was super horrific and I couldn’t recreate the thing that I had seen or that clients had seen in 2007 or ‘08, so I stopped doing that a couple of years ago.
Tyler with a nice rock
What was that like back in the day?
After the moratorium lifted, the first spring season in ’98 or ’99 was the craziest saltwater fishing I’ve ever seen or ever will see. Some weeks we’d catch a dozen fish over 50 inches -- fish hitting artificials for two hours in the evening. It was crazy. My buddy had a 68 pounder; there were some really, really big fish around.
It was nothing to go catch 20 or 30 or 40 big ones in an evening all on topwater, crawling over each other. We would drive in like four feet of water until we spooked ‘em, and then we’d turn around upwind and go hammer ‘em.
That’s insane. You may get some of that in the fall these days.
Yes, in the fall when they’re balled up, but even then, there is a giant missing link of fish classes. Where are the all the 16-25 pounders? Nowadays, fish are 10-28 inches, and then you’re missing generations of fish, and then they’re 50 inches. Everybody gets all wound up because they see people in the late season in Virginia or early spring catching 51 inchers -- well they’re catching those fish because there ain’t no other fish to catch!
How long would that spring run usually last?
Traditionally, I’d fish the upper bay and Susquehanna Flats until the end of April. Then I would come down sometime in mid-May, and I’d start fishing red drum in the lower Chesapeake, and that’s the beginning of my season now.
I feel like May is tough time between spring and summer patterns. What were some environmental cues that you look for to know the spring fishing is over and it’s time to move to summer patterns?
Double reds
By the last week of May or first week of June, depending on water temps, you start seeing everything changing. It gets a lot calmer. Spring is a rough, nasty time, and then ... all of a sudden … you start seeing calm days, and we start getting thunderstorms. You have a mass exodus of adult rockfish when the core temp of the bay is 65 and start seeing a big influx of cownose rays and the inward migration of cobia and drum.
When you get that transition from spring patterns to summer patterns, you’d generally have like a two week window mid-May where you would get some really nice quality 30-inch fish, which aren’t really migratory fish, but kind of like the biggest of the big resident fish. When that started to fizzle out and when the core temp of the bay warms rapidly -- because it feels like it’s a very abrupt transition these days from spring into summer -- that’s when I would boogie.
And then summer time is mostly cobia and drum?
We get drum from mid-May ‘till early October, and that’s become my bread and butter. On a positive note, the red drum and the speckled trout fishery is absolutely bananas. I’ve run two boats down here [in Cape Charles] from the last week of May into October, and it’s insane.
The focus has turned to cobia fishing, but nowadays with striped bass fishing fairly poor compared to what it used to be, everyone and their grandmom are doing that. I do a tagging program down here and get real-time data updates and these fishing are getting hammered on; rockfish are in better shape than they are. But it’s still good fishing, and the drum fishing is exceptional.
That’s great to hear that drum fishery is doing well! What kind of water do you find them in?
We have lots and lots of drum. The drum in the springtime are in shallow water and after the peeler crabs. When the water temps heat up and crabs start to leave the shallow water, you start to see all the drum push off and they get in big aggregations in deep water on shoals or around structure. The average red drum is 25-30 pounds, and its one of the bigger predator fish in the Chesapeake now, so that’s really what I’ve focused on the last couple of years as the [average size of] cobia shrank. We catch them in the open water for about three to three and a half months.
So that gets you into late summer and early fall.
Cobia action
Yup, and that’s when the drum start to ball up even tighter as they get closer to spawning in late summer and early fall, and we do a lot of live bait fish and throwing jigs at them.
That’s when the speckled trout season starts, too. The cobias start to leave with the first couple of north winds in late August, and the speckled trout fishing fires up. You can catch trout seaside and in the bay and in the creeks and guts, and sometimes on a five-hour trip, you can catch 125 nice speckled trout with the average fish being a keeper or better. And you’ll get puppy drum in the mix and stuff like that.
Now you’re getting into the prime of fall. Do you turn to rockfish then?
We do that until the water cools below 60, and then I usually shoot up to the mid-Chesapeake waters where there’s a lot more resident fish. We go up and do that for about a month and a half or so, light tackle jig fishing.
When the water temps are below 60, that’s when we really start seeing it pop off.
Do you fish in the winter, too?
When it really starts to cool off all the resident fish end up at Point Lookout. Now the Point Lookout fish everyone is catching are low 30 inches -- and it’s an awesome fish -- but I have pics of Thanksgiving in 1993 and ‘94 at Point Lookout, and they’re 48 inches. That’s unheard of now -- you get one random ocean fish in December or something; one or two will leak up from the very lower bay.
Decent silver king
Late, late season I used to go to the beach out of Ocean City after the Point Lookout thing. We’d come out of Ocean City and run north or south as hard and fast as we could until we ran into gannets, and I’d do that until about Christmas until it really got cold, and then I’d go to the Keys.
That would lead into tarpon, and sailfish season starts in early March. As the years go on, my Keys season becomes longer.
So I have to ask, given how much the fishery has declined, what regs would you recommend for stripers?
For striped bass, making them a game fish is probably never going to happen. I support commercial fishing when it’s done right -- everyone’s gotta eat – and the commercial fishing in the bay is a small percentage. Everyone loves pointing their fingers at commercial guys, but it’s really not. Its the bunker boats that need to be held responsible. They’re not some guy with four pound nets catching croakers and spot -- they got planes!
Also, slot limits are a great thing. The reason the drum fishery has been so good and continues to be so good is because you can’t kill the big ones. Low and behold, we have piles of them! Slot limits can help you preserve different year classes and is probably one of the best management tools that anybody has ever come up with. You went from redfish almost fished out to extinction to everywhere from the Chesapeake to Texas them coming out of our ears.
And how about cobia?
Beauty cobra
Well, with striped bass fishing being not good, cobia’s getting really picked on. I’ve seen the whole thing in Maryland, where people started catching them and killing every fish, and there really was no regulation till five years ago. And then David Sikorsky of CCA and me and a couple of other guys got Maryland to pass cobia regulations, because having no regulations on any fish that’s in your waters is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.
Right now, we’re allowed two fish over 40 inches – two fish per vessel, and one may be over 50 inches. But I would say, do have a slot limit for cobias. Everyone says, “there’s more cobia than there’s ever been!” … well no, everybody’s just getting better at it, and the fish is getting smaller and smaller. In four or five year of tagging, the average size tagged fish has shrank by eight or nine inches.
We don’t kill any big ones -- even with the rockfish, we never kill the big rockfish. There’s nothing wrong with killing fish; you just gotta know what are the right ones.
