Big news: MFCC podcast host Kevin Collins has teamed up with longtime MFCC member Eddy Kooyomjian of Monomoy Tackle on a new podcast series. Full episodes are available over at MonomoyTackle.com, but we wanted MFCC to get the same insider intel and captain insights right here too!
Monomoy Saltwater Journal Episode 6
Episode six of the Monomoy Saltwater Journal features Captain Tyler Putney of Flatliner Charters, a Plymouth native whose road to running his own boat ran through more than a decade of commercial dragging and scalloping around the Cape before he made the jump to full-time charter work.
Tyler's fishing story starts the way a lot of Cape Cod stories do: fishing freshwater ponds as a kid before graduating to a small boat with his Father and Uncle. From there he befriended fellow Plymouth resident Captain Cullen Lundholm, whose family had deep roots in the commercial fleet, and the two of them spent years chasing striped bass, bluefish, fluke, and sea bass together. It is the kind of resume that explains why Tyler's clients, including plenty of regulars from the My Fishing Cape Cod community, keep booking trips with him season after season.
Striped Bass: A Career Year
Ask Tyler to grade the 2026 striped bass season and he doesn't hesitate: it's probably the best year he's ever had, at least by sheer volume of fish. The overwhelming majority of that action came out of Cape Cod Bay, where he's spent most of his season running two charter trips a day.
His approach starts with top water. Tyler rigs every rod on the boat with big top water plugs before a trip even leaves the dock, and he sticks with that plan rather than hedging with other tactics from the jump. Part of that is practical — top water is what clients get the biggest thrill out of — but part of it is discipline. In his experience, committing to one game plan produces more consistent results than constantly second-guessing and switching gears mid-trip. If the top water bite doesn't materialize, live bait is the fallback, but only when it's available and when the clients on board are interested in going that route.
One color has stood out above the rest all summer: the angry squid pattern. Sometimes commonly referred to as "electric chicken", Tyler says it's been an outstanding producer this year, tracking with a broader squid-driven bite that's shown up across several MSJ guest reports this season.
Fishing Cape Cod Bay Over Monomoy
Captain Tyler has leaned heavily on Cape Cod Bay this year rather than making the trailer run south to Monomoy. The answer comes down to logistics as much as fish location. Running two trips a day makes it difficult to plan around the slack tide windows that Monomoy demands, while Cape Cod Bay simply doesn't carry that same tidal complication. Combine that with a bay bite that's been consistently strong all season, and there's been little incentive to go looking for fish elsewhere.
Tyler's ports of choice have shifted around within the bay over the years. In past seasons he ran almost exclusively out of Bass River, but 2026 has been a season of Plymouth and Sesuit Harbors respectively. Plymouth's appeal is flexibility — with fish scattered around the three bays, there's almost always something to fall back on nearby. Sesuit earns its keep during the stretch of summer when fish push up into the corner off Provincetown; running from Sesuit cuts down what would otherwise be a long haul from farther south in the bay.
The boat itself plays into the strategy too. Tyler describes the layout as a Key West, Miami-style charter design — wide open, built for casting with four anglers working top water plugs at once. It gives up some comfort when the weather turns, since there's nowhere to hide from spray, but Captain Tyler is candid that he built the program around the boat's strength as, in his words, "a fishing machine".
Chasing False Albacore and Bonito
As the calendar turns toward fall, Tyler's program starts to pivot toward funny fish, though the timing this year has been tricky. At the point of taping this report on September 1st, bonito trips had already produced some fish, and albies were showing up on the grounds, but they hadn't started biting in earnest. Tyler had been stretching his striper trips as long as he reasonably could while waiting for the albie bite to turn on, with plans to shift the fleet's focus hard toward funny fish the week of the Labor Day Holiday.
Where Tyler really diverges from the conventional wisdom is on presentation. The common approach to funny fish is matching the hatch — studying what the fish are keyed in on and picking a lure that mimics that exact bait as closely as possible. He's skeptical that precision matters as much as anglers think, especially when the bait in question is a bay anchovy the size of a fingernail. In his view, there's no realistic way to match something that small, even with a well-tied fly. Instead, he leans on what he calls "the startle bite": getting a lure directly in front of a false albacore's face, close enough and abrupt enough to trigger a reaction strike even when the fish wasn't actively looking to eat.
That philosophy shapes how he manages his spread, too. Rather than swapping lures constantly in search of the perfect match, Captain Tyler will run a confidence pattern across all four lines — an electric chicken, for example — and stick with it. The next day might bring a switch to all silver, but the changes come slowly and deliberately rather than trip to trip.
Once the funny fish bite does take hold, Tyler knows the season pulls him south, sometimes as far as the back side of the Bonito Bar. Finding fish isn't the hard part in the fall — finding the right school on the right bait is. When albies or bonito are keyed in on squid, Tyler says you can throw just about anything at them and get bit. When they're locked onto tiny bait in calm, easy conditions, he's seen anglers burn an entire day of casting for nothing.
Funny fish aren't the only thing on Captain Tyler's fall docket. He runs a handful of giant bluefin trips into the middle of October before the weather shuts that fishery down, then closes out the season with tautog trips, which he genuinely enjoys running. Once the charter season wraps, he doesn't head south like some of his peers. He stays in Plymouth, works on the house he doesn't get to spend much time in during the summer, and picks up commercial razor clamming in Kingston toward the end of winter and into spring — a solitary change of pace after a summer spent surrounded by clients.
Fall Run Preview
With cooler September nights and a north wind that signals the shift toward fall, Tyler's watching reports of striped bass scattered north of the Cape — fish off the coast of Maine, pods in Cape Cod Bay, and reports of fish at and beyond Nauset. The open question heading into the fall run is where those fish go from here.
Eddy is specifically curious whether the Monomoy stretch will see its usual share of migrating fish passing through in September and October, as it has in years past, or whether more of that migration funnels through Cape Cod Bay and the Cape Cod Canal instead.
On the bottom-fishing side, there's genuinely good news for anglers heading into the fall. As of September 1st, the black sea bass bag limit dropped to two fish per angler, but unlike past seasons — when the fishery would already be closed by this point — the season now stays open through the middle of October. That gives anglers a real shot at putting sea bass in the cooler as bycatch, or specifically targeting them, during a stretch of the calendar when that option simply hasn't existed in prior years.
That extended window lines up with a season that's already produced unusually strong bottom fishing at Monomoy proper according to Ed, an area anglers don't always associate with sea bass compared to striped bass, albies, and bluefish. Fish in what he calls the "Buzzard's Bay class" — 18-inch minimums with plenty of 20-inch fish mixed in — have been coming up regularly, making for a solid light-tackle option on days when the marquee species aren't cooperating.
Here's to hoping the next week or so turns on the albie and bonito bites closer to shore for those in smaller boats or surfcasting along the south side of Cape Cod! However, there is still fantastic bluefish blitzes from the beaches of the south side, great bottom fishing for fluke and sea bass at Monomoy, and a plentiful amount of large striped bass inside Cape Cod Bay. Cape Cod in the fall has options for everyone!
Tight Lines & Take Care!