Derek York: A Tiger Shark Tracked 800 Miles to New Orleans

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 471 — Derek York — a bull shark tagged off Galveston that turned up 80 miles up the Mississippi River, past New Orleans, plus Texas Brigades youth conservation camps and life running the Impact Outdoors Podcast.

Cold Open

Derek York: We're on the northern end of the Gulf where we're at, so we get a lot of big — you asked about cobia a while ago — we get a lot of cobia, 60 to 80 pounds over here, which is huge. We've seen fish over 100 pounds several times offshore, within twenty or thirty miles. But I do notice that near — you fish in Venice a lot — the Mississippi River Delta, that whole area is just so nutrient-loaded. You have a bigger congregation of the larger tunas over there, I think, because of that specifically. Our tuna is over here — I just went tuna fishing for yellowfin last week, and our average fish is in the 60-to-80-pound range. We get a lot of small ones too, but a big tuna over here is 125 to 150 pounds for sure. Hello, this is Derek York with the Impact Outdoors Podcast, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Welcome and Housekeeping

Tom Rowland: Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast today. We've got a good one for you — Derek York hosts the Impact Outdoors Podcast. He's a cool guy. He does a lot of work with kids, getting them into the outdoors, and doing some cool programs like the Texas Brigades. We're going to talk about that and all his work with the fisheries, tagging sharks, and all kinds of other cool stuff. So stick around for a great interview with Derek York from Impact Outdoors. And one more thing — if you like this podcast, which I hope that you do, it's become a big part of what I do. I'm trying to get the best guests possible, have the best interviews possible, and deliver the best content to you guys that I can. One way I've been able to do that is by receiving guest suggestions, show suggestions, topic suggestions, and questions from you guys, and I listen. I really do. We've gotten some of the best guests we've had on the podcast because someone suggested it from the audience. I go and check these people out, and sure enough, they're really cool people. I'm sure you know some people like that. I like good guests — guests that have a story. They don't have to be Bill Dance or Roland Martin or anybody that anybody's ever heard of. Lots of people have cool stories — that's not the defining thing of a good guest, in my opinion. So if you have suggestions about guests, about show topics, or questions you'd like for me to answer on the podcast, there's one way to get a hold of me and give me all of those things — it's the best way. It's a text number I've set up: (305) 930-7346. You can text the word 'team' to that, and you'll be in the inner circle. If you want updates and all the cool stuff we're doing, I'll be happy to provide that to you there. If you want to just ask questions, fire away, whatever you want to do. If you have suggestions for the show, that would be awesome, especially guest suggestions. And if you like this podcast, you can also go to iTunes and give us a rating and review. Five stars would be the best, and a review — you can look at some of the reviews that are up there, and people have said the nicest things, and it's so cool to see that. A lot of times they just say, 'I really like this one particular episode, and this is why.' That's a great review. Whatever you want to do, whatever you want to say is fine — that would be awesome. That will help other people find the show and help the show keep growing. We can have more and better guests and keep doing it for a lot longer. So that's it for today. Stick around for this awesome interview with Derek York from Impact Outdoors, coming right now. Derek, what's happening? How are you?

Catching Up: A Podcast Networking Summit and Turkey Hunting

Derek York: Hey man, we're just hanging out over here in South Texas, taking it one day at a time. Pretty busy right now, lots going on. So — really, how are you, buddy?

Tom Rowland: Well, I'm doing well. What do you got going on?

Derek York: We just finished up our big event over in West Texas — had some rowdy boys over here with us. We had a great opportunity to do a big networking event — I was kind of looking at something to do with my podcast and get some other people involved from across the United States. Luckily, Turner and Hayden came over as one of the podcasts, and we had people from New York, Ohio, Montana, Texas, Oklahoma, and a few other places come in. We had a great time, did some turkey hunting — no turkeys were harmed during that weekend, but we saw plenty, and I think Turner and Hayden both were pretty close to getting a bird, but they got some good footage and stuff. We had a great time. It was a great networking event, and I'm really looking forward to seeing where that program goes next year.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that's pretty exciting that you're getting that going, because there's a lot of people doing podcasts these days, and most of them are not being successful with it. About 90% of podcasts only make it one or two episodes. So getting together and helping each other out, talking about it — that certainly will help. It'll go a long way toward making sure people can continue with it. What do you think it is — you've had your podcast going for a while, and you've probably seen other podcasts start and stop. What's the challenge that keeps people from finishing what they start?

Derek York: It's definitely a challenge. It's a lot more work than most people think it is — as you well know. When I started mine, I talked to several people, and they said consistency is the thing — being able to provide content on a routine basis so people get accustomed to that. That's been a challenge lately, but we've been really good at putting out an episode every other week. You've got to make the time for it. I've got a pretty crammed schedule — working full time, running a charter business, starting up the podcast, and two little kids. So it's a lot of short nights' sleep. But in the end, it's been worth it over the past year and a half. I've been doing it and really trying to take that next step and grow it to a bigger national audience. I've been really blessed to have some great guests over the last year, including yourself. That's been a plus, because as you know, social media is such a big deal — doing interviews with people and having them share it, and just the effect of it all.

Tom Rowland: Who's been one of your favorite guests so far?

Derek York: Well, Tom Rowland. And then I had a really good interview with Bo Strickland from Mossy Oak a few weeks back — just hearing some of the stories about how the hunting-TV world and industry all started up back in the eighties, back when the best TV was really starting to come out for hunting and fishing. And then I interviewed Al McGlashan down in Australia a few months back, and that was a lot of fun — it was a late one. I had to interview him about one in the morning, Texas time, so to be able to talk to him — that was a good interview. And, you know, I've met a lot of people through Instagram — that's a great place to find people to interview, a lot of people you've never heard of. One really cool relationship we've developed over the past year is with a group called Kids Outdoors. They're based up north, and they do a lot with kids traveling around the country showing them hunting, fishing, and wildlife survival techniques. We had them down here to Texas last year and filmed a couple of episodes for their show on the water, and just really developed a good relationship with them and several other people.

Tom Rowland: So you still have your Texas Brigades — are you still involved with that?

Texas Brigades: Building Leaders Through the Outdoors

Derek York: Yes, yeah — and we're right in the middle of getting ready to start up our camp season. My wife and I got asked to be part of this program, the Texas Brigades, back in late 2009, serving as instructors at a freshwater fisheries conservation and leadership camp. We knew nothing about it, so we just went ahead and jumped in. It's a five-day program. Kids are selected from all across Texas, and some from even out of Texas. They come in and stay for the whole time, and we show up with our game plan for every day. It's a very rigorous schedule for the kids, and — not really knowing how it was going to go — we were hooked the first couple of days. Seeing the effort the kids put into this program, and what we get back as the adults, is just tremendous. The program really instills leadership and public-speaking skills in these kids, which, as you know, is hard to come by these days, for anybody. And that's kind of wrapped into the outdoors as well — absolutely.

Tom Rowland: Okay, so how do you teach them public-speaking skills and leadership?

Derek York: We kind of do it subliminally — so they don't really know it at first. The kids are all divided up into different groups — schools, flocks, coveys, whatever, for each camp — and they work as a team throughout the week. Our schedule starts at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning and runs till about 11:00 at night — pretty much nonstop. We're changing from classroom settings to outdoor settings and really try to do everything hands-on, so they retain the information, because if you don't do it yourself, you're never going to remember what you did during the week. As far as public speaking, one of the simplest things we do is give each student a quote at the beginning of the first day. Their job is to memorize that quote, and then they have to get up in front of the group over the first couple of days, say their quote, and say what it means to them — how they interpret it. That really is the first step in breaking that shell to get them up there, and some of the kids are really introverted, like I was when I was younger — I hated talking in front of anybody. But it really, really works. I'll give a quick example. We had a young lady show up at the Bass Brigade camp, probably 2012 or so — first time she'd ever been away from home, and it's pretty nerve-wracking going into something like this. She had a really hard first and second day — wanted to go home, and we had her on the phone with her parents trying to get through it. By the third day, she'd realized what we were doing, and she just took over. By the end of the week, the cadets and all the instructors vote on the top cadet for that whole week, and she won that year. She did a complete one-eighty, and that just proved to us the success of the program and what we're doing is working for these kids. Being involved with it over the last ten-plus years now, we've seen these kids go out of high school after multiple camps each summer, and now they've gone into college, and now they've got jobs and careers. We're not looking to make them all biologists or game wardens — we just want them to be conservation-aware, well-informed, because it's a passion they already have. They love being outdoors, and being successful in life and the skills we're teaching them at these programs really helps do that.

Tom Rowland: That's cool. So how do you go about picking the quotes you give the kids?

Derek York: We've got a long list of stuff we've used over the years, from all different people, and they're pretty much predetermined. They each get a journal every week, and we attach the quote inside that. It's pretty funny — we use a lot of these quotes every year, and you hear different interpretations of them, and it's pretty cool to see how the kids react. Some of the other stuff we do is pretty interesting, and it's very conservation-oriented. My day job — I work for the state here in Texas as a fisheries technician in Galveston, and we do a lot of public meetings, like FWC does over in Florida, about issues when they're looking at changing regulations. So we do a mock stakeholder meeting with the kids — we assign each group of kids a different role to play, whether it's representing a group like CCA, commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen, or a group like PETA — the kind of groups that would normally show up to these meetings to voice their opinions. We'll pick a topic — flounder is a big issue down here, along with oysters and, obviously, trout and redfish; the trout regulations have been changing quite a bit the last few years. They get a few days to go over that and come up with their strategy, and then we have a panel of instructors sit up front. They come up and present their case, whether they're for or against it and why, and then we grade them on it. It's one of the things they're competing on all week for different prizes — fishing trips and different incentives. It's pretty funny — these kids are so creative, man. Some of them will get dressed up in waders and make signs — all kinds of cool stuff. It's a pretty neat experience. We also do a lot of team-building events throughout the week — a lot of trust exercises. We'll do what we call a 'lap sit,' where everybody stands in a circle and then sits down to see if they can create a sitting circle on top of each other's knees. And one of the funniest things we do — where they really have to work together — we have a giant rubber ring tied to ropes, and six or seven people in each group each have a rope, and they have to move and stack cans on top of each other in a pyramid or whatever we give them to work on. It sounds pretty stupid, but it's actually a really cool way to get them to talk to each other, learn not to yell over each other, and really work together to accomplish the goal.

Tom Rowland: Yeah — and once you get them understanding these leadership qualities and the public speaking, what's involved in the camp as far as hands-on outdoor stuff?

Hands-On Fisheries Work at Camp

Derek York: We start the first day going over fish biology and anatomy — we do some dissections. We're heavily involved with Texas A&M University at Galveston, so we have a lot of my friends from the shark and fish lab come in, and we do dissections on sharks and fish and go over basic anatomy and biology. But really, the cool stuff — we take them out on the boats, so they get to see firsthand how we, as fisheries managers, collect our data. We show them how we utilize shrimp nets for catching stuff on the bay bottoms, we'll run a small gillnet so they can see how that's effective for sampling larger fish, and we do bag seines, oyster dredges, and different things, going over what we catch and why those species are found in that particular area versus other areas. We're lucky because we're the Coastal Brigade in Galveston, so we're close to a lot of stuff — a lot of the other Brigades camps are out in central-west Texas on private ranches. We're close to one of our coastal fisheries hatcheries, so we spend a whole day there, and they get an in-depth tour of the facility — how the fish are spawned, how they develop eggs, hatchlings, and get moved into the stock tanks. They really enjoy that. We also do a day at Galveston Island State Park, where we do a beach-versus-bay comparison, looking at the different things we find on the beachfront versus in the bay. We bus the kids back and forth in different groups for that. It takes a lot of people to put this on — we utilize a ton of volunteers, anywhere from 20 to 30 a day, because when we go out, we do rotational setups in smaller groups, so there's more attention on them from the instructors. That really seems to be the ticket to making everything work.

Tom Rowland: How does a kid get involved in that? How would somebody go about it? You said they have to be selected.

Derek York: Yeah — it's a competitive process. The application process for Brigades starts November 1 and usually ends March 15, and it's basically all online. They just go to the Brigades website, texasbrigades.org, and fill out the application — stuff about school, any extracurriculars. We base part of the scoring on that, but they also have to write two essays, and those questions change every year. Usually one is about why they're passionate about conservation or the outdoors, and one is tailored to the leadership question — who's a leader, that kind of thing.

Tom Rowland: That's interesting — so the kids that are doing really well in school are the ones getting selected, since they have to write those essays.

Derek York: You would think that, but we get a lot of kids, as far as the applications go, that don't have a lot of sports or FFA or 4-H on their record, but they really shine in their writing. And they're not long essays, Tom — they're like 500 words. But that's one thing I'm always concerned about — that everybody gets a fair chance — and it's worked out. We've got kids from all different backgrounds and walks of life, and it's really been cool to see how successful they've been after going through the program.

Tom Rowland: It sounds like an amazing program. But when I hear that, I think about myself — how old are these kids?

Derek York: These are 13-to-17-year-olds.

Tom Rowland: Seventeen? Okay — well, maybe I had started to understand how the world worked by then, but not necessarily at 13 or 14. I didn't do very well in school — it was hard for me to concentrate. I liked the sports aspect of it. I probably would have been diagnosed with eight or ten learning disabilities had today's medicine been part of it. But something like that program would have probably had an amazing impact on me — somebody who wasn't interested in school, thought learning was boring. But I wasn't learning the things I was interested in. Sometimes if you can get to that kid and show them something they're interested in, all of a sudden you see they're not dumb — they're incredibly smart, actually. They were just incredibly uninterested in what was going on in school. Have you seen that kind of example play out?

Derek York: Absolutely. We've got several kids that come to mind — they're not kids now, they're adults — that came in exactly like what you're talking about, didn't have the best GPA, and just needed something to grab their attention. I think the success of this program, which has been around for almost thirty years now, is being able to give them something they don't get in normal public education — hands-on stuff. You're in a classroom, especially today, and being able to provide the opportunity to meet all these professionals, in private and public sectors, fisheries and wildlife biologists, game wardens, and just getting the experience of being around them — it's huge. Everybody I know says the same thing: 'Man, why didn't they have this when I was growing up?' I grew up in Oklahoma, and they have something now, similar — a one-day program — and there's lots of youth camps, fishing camps or hunting camps, but a lot of them don't really instill the characteristics we're trying to help these kids develop with the public speaking, leadership, and team building.

Tom Rowland: That's a really interesting dynamic — you have somebody who'd be really uncomfortable getting in front of the class to do a math problem, but if you're talking about something they're interested in, they might be the best in the whole class at public speaking about that issue — something associated with redfish or flounder. I'm sure you see that all the time, but that's cool that's going on there. How many sessions do you guys put on each summer?

Eight Camps a Summer

Derek York: So we have eight camps, and they all run in June and July. The first one starts in June this summer. The other camps include a North and South Texas camp on bobwhite quail, covering quail habitat and working with bobwhites and other species here in Texas. We have a North and South Texas Buckskin Brigade, focusing on white-tailed deer, and then the Bass Brigade, which is all freshwater — Gary Klein, one of the founders from Major League Fishing, is heavily involved with that program, along with a lot of other great people. We spent about six years working with that program, and it's awesome. We have one on the ranching industry called the Ranch Brigade, and that's one of our most popular camps for sure — really working on rangeland ecology and the ranching lifestyle, cattle, and things like that. They do a lot of fun things — t-post-driving contests and all kinds of crazy stuff.

Tom Rowland: You get to fish in the ranch tanks?

Derek York: The Bass Brigade camp does, because they have that same place.

Tom Rowland: Oh man — that'd be worth going just for that. I know there's some amazing fishing in some of those — what they call stock tanks. You get to them and you're thinking it's going to be this rectangular mud pit, and it's a lake bigger than the one you have at your house. Everything's bigger in Texas — that's what they say before you go there, and when you get there, you realize it's not just a little bit bigger, it's way bigger. I'm going to this person's house, and I've passed three houses on the way in, and they're all bigger than any house I've ever seen, and those are all considered the guest house. How far could this driveway go — miles. And then finally you get to the main house, and they say, 'Oh, you can go fish in the pond,' and you drive over a little hill, and there's a giant lake there, and you're thinking, where's the pond, because this doesn't seem like a pond. But it's just funny, man, that everything is bigger in Texas — including the hospitality. I've had really good luck there with people being generally incredibly nice and welcoming. Texas is a good state, man.

Derek York: It is. And being born in Oklahoma and living there for twenty-one, twenty-two years — Oklahoma's the same way. I always said growing up, 'I'll never move to Texas' — that was kind of our archrival in every sport — and I'll probably never leave Texas now.

The Texas Coast

Tom Rowland: Well, I mean, Oklahoma's nice and everything, but you're missing a major part of what's interesting about Texas — the coast. I mean, the Texas coast — I did a podcast with a guy, Stilt House — I'm forgetting his name.

Derek York: Yeah, I remember that.

Tom Rowland: Mike Medrano — we met on Christmas Island, and he wrote this incredibly beautiful book on the stilt houses of Texas. When you start flipping through that book, if you've been to Texas once or twice, you start flipping through it and you're like, 'Whoa, there is obviously a lot of Texas that I haven't seen and should go see.' That's a cool book — if you're a fan of beautiful coffee-table books, it's got Tim Romano photography in it, and it's one of the nicest books I have on my shelf. Parts of Texas look like South Carolina, parts look like the Florida Keys, parts look like Mexico and further south than that. It's just a cool place. I like that Port Aransas area when I've fished — I've got incredibly limited Texas fishing experience, but Port Aransas is a place we went and spent about a week pre-fishing for a redfish tournament, and that was nice. We were also in Kemah, and I keep harping on how bad Kemah was — sorry for that.

Derek York: We've got to get you back over, because Kemah is literally about five minutes from where I'm at right now.

Tom Rowland: You know how to fish in that muddy water?

Derek York: We catch a lot of redfish over here.

Tom Rowland: I'm sure there's a lot of redfish to catch — it's just the polar opposite of our fishing. We're used to clear, shallow water, and this — I was just like, man, this looks like the Florida Keys after a category-five hurricane. But the guys that were there knew how to catch them — they could absolutely do it. I'm sure you can too. It's interesting in a different way — those guys are fishing slicks, where the fish are eating under the surface and you see a slick on top of the water where they're eating menhaden or whatever, and they leave a slick, and sure enough, you fish that just like you'd fish a wake or a tail or a tarpon roll — anything visible that shows you where the fish are. That was all new to us.

Derek York: Yeah — we've got a lot of marsh and stuff, but like you said, water visibility here is totally different. Even from Port Aransas — Port Aransas generally has a lot cleaner-looking water. It's just the sediment load — we're kind of up in the armpit of the Gulf of Mexico, so we have a predominant southeast flow from the Gulf that's constantly pushing sediment up into this end of the area, so we have a lot more stained water. But we get our days where it looks like Bermuda in the summertime. We get some days where it's just crystal clear. Last year was incredible all summer long — usually we'll get maybe a week at most of really nice water, but last summer I ran a lot of trips out of the Gulf passes and the lower part of the bay in just beautiful conditions, almost to a point where it was harder to catch fish because we're not used to fishing in that. So we had a reverse role there, but we still got a lot of pelagics coming into the bay — more tripletail than normal, cobia, and things like that. So that's always exciting.

Cobia, Tripletail, and a Fish Mystery

Tom Rowland: What's a good-sized cobia over there?

Derek York: We get some of them. I've caught several tripletail up to 15 pounds over here — the state record's right around 30, I think. Most of the bigger tripletail in Texas tend to be caught south of here in the Matagorda Bay ecosystem, but we do get quite a few good numbers up here. Matagorda Bay produces a lot of big fish in the bay — they're typically fishing crab-trap pots for them.

Tom Rowland: That's the same kind of thing we do in the Keys for tripletail, except in the last couple of years there's just been this explosion of tripletail numbers, and they're not necessarily keying in on any structure — you just get into an area, look out, and there's a black fish floating there, and another one over there, and another one over there. One of the things with your fisheries work — one of the things we saw with our tripletail last year was this red sore on their shoulder. It was so visible that you'd see a black fish with a red spot on it, and sometimes you'd see the red spot before you'd see anything else. I asked a bunch of different biologists and people who should know a lot more about fish than I do what they thought that was, and Richard Black and the other fishing guys said it's probably some sort of spawning thing, where they're rubbing up against something, or another fish is biting them. But it's only on one side, right on the shoulder area, and it wasn't like a sore on a sick fish — it was more like when fish are bedding and their tails get worn. You can see it's going to heal, and it doesn't form a sore or a cyst, just a red spot where the scales have been knocked off. Rich even said maybe they're getting sunburned, but I don't think they're getting sunburned.

Derek York: I don't know — I haven't seen any of that on any fish over here or heard of anything like that. I'll send you a picture after, and you can check it out. But, yeah, interesting thing.

Tom Rowland: What do you think about the theory that fish are the largest in the northernmost portion of their range, generally, as a rule of thumb?

Derek York: I don't know. As far as around here — we're on the northern end of the Gulf where we're at, so we get a lot of big cobia, 60 to 80 pounds over here, which is huge. We've seen fish over 100 pounds several times offshore, within twenty or thirty miles. But I do notice that near — you fish in Venice a lot — the Mississippi River Delta, that whole area is just so nutrient-loaded. You have a bigger congregation of the larger tunas over there, I think, because of that specifically. Our tuna is over here — I just went tuna fishing for yellowfin last week, and our average fish is in the 60-to-80-pound range, and we get a lot of smaller ones too, but a big tuna over here is 125 to 150 pounds for sure. But it's weird — we're seeing increased numbers of bluefin tuna catches through the last several years.

Bluefin Tuna and Great White Sharks: More of Them, or More Cameras?

Tom Rowland: There's been a lot more bluefin — we're seeing them in the Keys. It helps with Instagram, because maybe not that many years ago you'd hear somebody say, 'I think we saw a bluefin,' and you wouldn't know. But now there's a five-minute video of a bluefin circling the boat and coming right next to it — I mean, it was a bluefin. There was a video of a yellowfin underneath one of the bridges in the Keys, six feet deep, and it's crazy under the bridge — you might hear somebody say, 'Oh, I saw a tuna,' and think, 'That was definitely a jack crevalle,' but then there's a video, and it's not just a quick snippet — it's minutes of video of this tuna under the bridge. There's been a lot more bluefin seen in the Keys, and in other places. It's interesting — I haven't heard about them in Texas. What's going on there?

Derek York: I don't know — they just broke the state record a few weeks ago with one that was, I think, seven hundred and eighty-six pounds.

Tom Rowland: So these aren't just tiny ones.

Derek York: No, these are the big breeding fish — these are monster tunas. There's literally been dozens of them caught, that I know of, in the last two years specifically out at the floaters, which are anywhere from 100 to 150 miles offshore of the Texas coast, in that two-to-three-thousand-foot-of-water range. We're not seeing them in close, but they are showing up more over here. Maybe it's just more people fishing and recording and bringing these things up to the surface, but it's definitely been interesting to hear about all these.

Tom Rowland: I know — I hope that means there are more of them, but you can't make a correlation just because people are seeing more. It doesn't necessarily mean there are more — there are also more cell phones with video, different methods of fishing, more center-console boats going way out further than normal, which leads to more people on the water at all. It's the same thing with the great white shark in the Keys — it seemed unheard of for most people that there were great whites around, but the commercial fishermen I knew, they know there have been great whites there for a long time, and they just never said anything about it. But after Chris Fischer tags all these sharks, and you have this tracking, sure enough, they come right through there — and through South Carolina, and all these places. Maybe we've been seeing them more, or maybe none are being cited but there are obviously some around. It could be the same thing for bluefin tuna. One of the coolest stories I ever heard about bluefin tuna was from a guy named Tom Pearson — legendary fisherman, fished a lot in Key West and Sebastian Inlet, a real gem, he's done it all, tremendous knowledge and experience. He told me that they used to have tournaments in the Bahamas for bluefin tuna, and people didn't see that giant fish as a food fish at all back then. They'd weigh them in for the tournament, and when it was over, they'd tie them by the tails, drag them out to the edge of the ledge, and just sink them.

Derek York: Wow.

Tom Rowland: And those fish now — that's a valuable fish, worth tens of thousands of dollars. It's just funny — a fish that nobody considered valuable.

Derek York: Yeah, and they have a mystique around them. One of the things I talked extensively about with Al McGlashan down in Australia is he's a huge advocate for fishing policies, and he just did a documentary on the bluefin species down there — the southern bluefin. I highly recommend watching it — I think it's called Life on the Line — just talking about the changes over time in the fishing aspect, like what you're talking about, and how now they're managed to be successful in the commercial fishing industry while still keeping a good population reproducing. It's totally different than anything I've seen done here, as far as how they fish for them. It's a pretty cool thing to watch. It's just a unique species. And talking about Chris — I had Chris and Brett on the show earlier this year. I've known Chris for a while, and we do a lot of shark tagging at work.

Shark Tagging: The Bull Shark That Swam Past New Orleans

Derek York: We've utilized spot tags and PSAT tags and different things like that, and it's incredible to see where these sharks go over a short amount of time. We haven't tagged any great whites, obviously, but we tag a lot of bull sharks, blacktips, and spinners. We've tagged a few tiger sharks, scalloped hammerheads, and great hammerheads, and we tagged a bull shark over here off of Galveston one year — within two weeks, that fish was swimming 80 miles up the Mississippi River. Normally we don't put a satellite tag on a bull shark, because they're not a basking shark — they don't really come to the surface a lot — but we were trying to get some tags out for A&M, so they went ahead and tagged it. It was a big male, probably around 300 pounds, and within two weeks that fish was 80 miles up the Mississippi.

Tom Rowland: Up the Mississippi? Eighty miles up the Mississippi?

Derek York: Yeah. So where would that put him?

Tom Rowland: Eighty miles up from Venice — that would be way past New Orleans, I would think.

Derek York: Sure — so, yeah.

Tom Rowland: That makes a lot of sense with a bull shark. I don't know how many people have fished in the mouth of the Mississippi like that — even just five or ten miles up the river — but I've been there with my friend Anthony Randazzo, and he'll show you: 'The trout are here.' And I'll say, 'How do you know?' And he says, 'Look at the bottom machine.' And I'm looking at the bottom machine, and it looks like it's 15 feet deep, and he says, 'Yeah, but from there to there is trout, thick.' I thought we were marking the bottom — we were marking the top of the trout school, and it's like a carpet across the bottom of the Mississippi River. Isn't that crazy? So many trout — I can't even imagine, uncountable numbers of trout. Just the health of that area is unbelievable — how many fish, and what that river dumping into the Gulf of Mexico does to create a fishing habitat for fish species to grow. It's got to be the most valuable place as far as the ocean goes — that has to be one of the most valuable places in the world, because it's a fish factory. That's what you hear people talk about, but until you see it, and then jump up on plane and run a mile, and it's still like that — you're like, well, it's been like that since where we left. And he says, 'Yeah, this time of year' — I don't know, just incredible numbers of fish.

Derek York: And that's why I think people see Louisiana having very liberal limits on a lot of species to keep, and it's because of that — they have so many fish over there. But bull sharks are funny — they love freshwater, and they've been known to go over a thousand miles up the Mississippi River system. They've been tracked that far north. But we have a very freshwater-influenced ecosystem here in Galveston Bay, with several rivers dumping in, and they thrive here — this is a nursery for them. They have their young in the bay, they grow up, and then they move out offshore. We have a lot of blacktips in the bay too, but the passes are where you're going to see most of the bigger predators — the ones that are famous, the tiger sharks and the hammerheads and stuff.

Tom Rowland: So with the tagging you've done, what else have you learned about these sharks? Did you have any other interesting movement?

Derek York: We've noticed some species come and go in different patterns — like a real common shark, I'm sure, over in Florida, the Atlantic sharpnose, the one with the white spots all over it — we've had a couple of years where they were just gone, we weren't seeing any of them. Normally we catch them using a longline — basically a mile-long trotline with a hundred hooks on it, and we'll catch anywhere from 30 to 70 fish in an hour on these things.

Tom Rowland: And this is all for research?

Derek York: Yep. We do it for an hour so the survival rate's high, and we tag everything — all the sharks are weighed and measured, whether it's a game fish or a shark or whatnot. We've been doing that for about eleven or twelve years here. We started catching so many big sharks that we ended up having to have a cradle made — it's about eight feet long, and we can pull these bigger fish into it to get them up on the boat. It's pretty exciting — I'll send you a video of one of those processes being done.

Tom Rowland: And then you're tagging them, weighing them, measuring them, all that.

Derek York: Yep. So the leaders on this longline that attach to the main line are seven-hundred-pound-test, with a 15/0 Mustad circle hook on them, and then the main line is 1,200-pound test.

Tom Rowland: How often do you just see a gangion with no hook on it?

Derek York: Not very often. The problem we have is we'll catch so many smaller sharks, and these bigger bull sharks will come up and eat them, and then they get hooked. Sometimes we'll get a chafe issue where they'll eventually bite through, so we've had a couple of those, but surprisingly, when those big sharks get on, we've had more issues with them swimming — they're so big, a four- or five-hundred-pound shark will pull the gangions down and bunch up and start chewing on the main line, and we've had that happen several times where they chewed through it and got off. Then we have to go to the other end, reconnect the line, and pull it back in from that direction, which is a pain, but you've got to get it back on the boat. We've had one bull shark that I know was over 500 pounds, based on the sizes of these other 400-plus we've caught — he was so big, and that was before we had our cradle, so there was nothing we could do with him. But it was pretty incredible to see a fish that big so close to where we fish all the time. Most people just don't think there are that many sharks over here in Texas, but they're all over the coast.

Tom Rowland: A lot of people wading over there, up to their neck?

Derek York: Oh, yeah.

Tom Rowland: That's an interesting thing with Texas — I get it when the water's too shallow for a boat, or you can't see into the water, so you get out and wade. But we noticed a lot of people getting out in chest-deep water and wading, leaving their boat right there. I'm sure there's a reason for it, and I still kind of scratch my head a little bit, but that was definitely what was going on.

Derek York: I don't do a lot of wade fishing — I like my boat, and I'm in the water enough at work — but there's a lot of wade fishing, it's huge, especially in this bay system.

Tom Rowland: People explained it to me that you're feeling these depressions — you're in this basically deserted flat where it's all the same, and if you can find that little depression that's a little bit deeper than the surrounding areas, it could be loaded up with fish, and you may not be able to see or feel that from your boat unless you're pushing with a push-pole — if you've got a trolling motor, you're not going to notice a three-, four-, or five-inch depression that could hold a lot of fish. So I get that — I certainly understand it.

Derek York: But — chest deep?

Tom Rowland: Chest deep. Seems a little on the extreme side for me.

Derek York: Not me.

Flounder: A Declining, Mysterious Fish

Tom Rowland: So tell me about the issue — when we first started talking, you said flounder was a big issue in Texas. What's the issue with flounder in Texas?

Derek York: Yeah, so we've been seeing a decline in certain year classes through all of our sampling, and the public has brought it up multiple times — it's a hot topic for sure. The state has gone in and tried to be proactive, kind of alleviating some of the things we're seeing possibly coming in the future with a decrease in numbers. Flounder are a very unique species in that they need certain parameters to spawn out in the Gulf — water temperature is the most important one. If it doesn't get cold enough in the winter, they just don't have a good spawn. We've had a lot of warm winters recently — the last few have been fairly cold, so we're expecting good numbers, and we have been seeing quite a few juvenile flounder coming back into the bay system this year from this past winter. When I moved down here, it was crazy — you could keep 10 flounder, with a possession limit of 20, because gigging is huge over here, so it's not a game fish in Texas. You could go out, catch 10 fish, go back out after midnight, catch another 10, and keep 20 fish. Obviously, with a species that's potentially declining, that's not going to be the greatest thing to have happen. So they've changed the regulations and dropped the possession limit down to 10, and then now it's down to five. Most of the year you can keep five flounder, 15 inches and up, and starting this year we've had to implement a total closure during the fall run, between November 1st and mid-December — six weeks with no retaining flounder, and then it opens back up to five fish. It'll be interesting — it'll take a couple of years to see what that regulation change does. That's not my department, but we go out and collect the samples. We're definitely trying to be proactive in helping the species get back to where we want it. It's crazy, because we've also had the last few years where we've seen record numbers of flounder being caught, and a lot of that's just because there are so many more people on the water — a lot more guides taking three or four people out and catching a lot of fish. But what we're seeing is that in a year or two, the stock starts going down.

Tom Rowland: So in your job with the fisheries, what's the next step when you notice a decline like that? Do you mount a study, make it a species of interest — what do you do?

Derek York: Stock enhancement is what we're working on right now — hatching these fish in a hatchery. Texas Parks and Wildlife has really been one of the leaders in the country as far as being able to grow out flounder in-house. It's at a small level now, but with CCA and other groups helping fund some of these research projects, they just completed a whole new hatchery building south of me, specifically for flounder — half the building's geared toward growing the rotifers to feed these fish when they hatch, and the other half is a multimillion-dollar facility they've started. They stock millions and millions of trout and redfish on the Texas coast every year, and we did a study probably ten years ago to see the percentage of fish in the wild that are from hatcheries — they have a genetic marker they use to tell. We had over five percent of the fish we were seeing coming from hatcheries, which is super high — usually it's one to two percent from what I've seen in the past. So it does make an impact putting these fish back in the wild. We're hoping they can get the flounder program nailed down so that one day they can start putting millions of flounder back in the bay, just like the trout and redfish — but they're a lot harder to deal with because of the temperature variations. Flounder can change from male to female depending on the temperature of the water — a certain percentage of them will.

Tom Rowland: What causes them to change — warmer water or cooler water?

Derek York: The colder water will determine whether you have more females versus males.

Tom Rowland: So if you're hatching these fish, you want more females, I'm assuming.

Derek York: Yes. It's got to be around 65 to 67 degrees Fahrenheit for that — and a lot of times the Gulf water is still in the seventies in the winter, out where they're spawning. That's kind of the other hard part about flounder — they spawn in such a vast area offshore that we don't really know that much about them.

Tom Rowland: Has anybody ever actually seen flounder spawn offshore?

Derek York: They're doing a lot of acoustic tagging on these fish now, putting arrays of receivers all over the place, so they're starting to see those fish move further out. People have caught southern flounder almost 100 miles offshore, so we know they're going out there, but without a camera attached, it's so hard to track.

Tom Rowland: I just wonder what that would look like — a flounder spawn. We have different spawns in Florida that are really notable, like the mutton snapper spawn — divers can go down and check it out, mostly at night, but you could conceivably see it with your own eyes. The permit spawn is another one — I don't know if you'd see spawning behavior, but you certainly see a lot of fish balled up offshore. I wonder what a flounder spawn would look like — whether it happens at the bottom or in the middle of the water column.

Derek York: Yeah, I'm not sure. I just know the eggs float, and they come back into the estuaries, and that's where they start growing up. It's definitely a mysterious fish, I guess you could say.

Tom Rowland: It is a mysterious fish — a weird fish and a delicious fish. The fact that it's delicious would tend to lend itself toward more studies being done on it, and even toward it being a commercially harvested fish. We see a lot of flounder in restaurants — it is a commercially viable species. How do they fish for flounder commercially?

Derek York: We have commercial giggers over here — the limits are a little higher for those guys.

Tom Rowland: They don't mess with rod and reel, or hook and line?

Derek York: No, not usually. But those have also been tightened — I can't remember the exact numbers right now, Tom, but I know they've been tightened on the commercial side as well, just because of everything going on. You'll go to a lot of the Asian markets and see flounder that have obviously been farm-raised somehow, and, since redfish is a game fish in Texas, they can't be commercially fished, along with spotted seatrout — so you'll see a lot of those that are farm-raised, usually brought in from Louisiana to sell.

Tom Rowland: You've got a bunch of game fish in a fish market — how do you know they're legal? Is there a paper trail?

Derek York: Yeah, they've got to have the documentation.

Tom Rowland: I guess so.

Derek York: It's tough, man — I'd hate to be a game warden.

Tom Rowland: Interesting — you would like this guy I just had on the podcast, on your podcast too — I'm sure you guys would have a lot to talk about. Wayne Saunders, he does the Warden's Watch podcast. He just joined Waypoint too, so you can get in touch with him really easily. But, man, he's got cool stories — he's been a game warden all over the place, national park ranger, all kinds of different things. If you ever need that voice of a law-enforcement, game-warden-type person, he's a good one to have on the show. I had a really fun time talking to him. What about the oysters? You also mentioned that's another issue you've got going on.

Oysters: Hurricanes, Reef Restoration, and Water Quality

Derek York: Yeah — the hurricanes have really done a number on us over here since 2008, with Hurricane Ike, and we had Rita right before that and Katrina right before that. Hurricane Ike really wiped out a lot of the oyster population in Galveston Bay. Our bay system is a little over 600 square miles, and that storm basically covered up about 80 to 85 percent of our live oyster reefs with silt — and they're not going to survive that. So we basically formed a new department in our division, working extensively on oyster habitat development. We tried lots of different things, working heavily with the commercial industry — back then we did some bagless dredging, where they'd go out with their oyster dredges, about 48 inches wide, and take the bags off, trying to pull the shell material back up to the top.

Tom Rowland: Did that work?

Derek York: To an extent — it was a lot of work for sure. We also started testing different cultch materials — different types of river rock and things that would work best for spat, the baby oysters, to attach to. We found a rock that was working really well, and we started using federal money to purchase it and start planting these reefs on historically live reef areas and some new areas, building new reefs anywhere from 20 to over 100 acres in size, all over the bay, wherever the salinity levels are good for oysters to grow. The oyster habitat here is a huge area for us to fish — that's where most people are fishing, on oyster reefs, especially in the summertime for trout and things like that. So that made a big impact on the fishery and the health of the bay. We've seen higher turbidity levels in the water just because it's not getting filtered as much. We kind of got through Hurricane Ike and started rebuilding, and we were doing pretty good — and then, recently, Hurricane Harvey came in and did the total opposite, inundating us with nearly 60 inches of rainwater in a couple of days. All that fresh water stayed in the bay for nearly a month and basically killed all the oysters again. So we're back doing similar things over again now. We've also changed a lot of the regulations for the commercial guys, trying to bring more people to the table and help rebuild these reefs with new cultch, new rock, new shell. Part of those regulations requires the companies that run these oyster boats to give back and put more material back every year, to help replenish the stock they're taking out.

Tom Rowland: Interesting — what about CCA? Are they helping with those kinds of things? I know they do in Florida.

Derek York: Yeah, CCA does a lot — they do a lot of ongoing projects throughout the year, up and down the Texas coast, working on oyster reefs and other general habitat restoration projects in areas that are heavily eroded. And here in Galveston we've got the Galveston Bay Foundation, which does a lot of stuff with oysters too — they run a big program where people grow oysters in bags on their docks, and then they collect those and plant oyster reefs with them every year. There's a lot of good groups doing this.

Tom Rowland: Yeah — Blair Wiggins is working with CCA in Florida to help water quality through initiatives like that, and they've been really successful with it. They did the bag thing on the docks too, getting a lot of people involved, spreading the word and raising awareness that this is certainly an issue. Well, good — I'm glad people are involved with that for sure, but it's a shame that the oyster is such an important part of the filtration of the water. It is the ocean's filter, and when they go — either through a natural process or through our own mistakes — it's not good.

Derek York: Yep. The good thing is they grow pretty quick — three years and you'll have an oyster that's legally harvestable. They've got to be three inches long, so they grow about an inch a year, and like you said, they can filter crazy amounts of water per day.

Tom Rowland: I know, I know — that's cool. Alright, so it's cool catching up with you and everything. I want to ask you some quick questions — this is the fun part.

Quick-Fire Questions

Tom Rowland: First of all, I want to know where the best barbecue in Texas is.

Derek York: Oh, man — my favorite place is probably Cooper's, the original, up in Llano, Texas.

Tom Rowland: What's the best there — is it ribs, or is it brisket or pork belly?

Derek York: That's about that thick — hell yeah. If we get you over here next year, we'll have to swing through there.

Tom Rowland: I'd say so, because Texas is known for barbecue and good food. So that's cool. Alright — so you've got a choice: you can buy, you can rent, or you can sell these three things — a fly rod, a spin rod, and a bait caster.

Derek York: Oh, man — I'm gonna buy a spinning rod for sure. That's just always been my most versatile tool.

Tom Rowland: Which one are you renting?

Derek York: The fly rod.

Tom Rowland: Okay — which one are you selling, the bait caster?

Derek York: Probably — I just don't use it much. Being a charter fisherman down here, spinning rods are the way to go for most of my clientele.

Tom Rowland: That's interesting, because when we were fishing those redfish tournaments, there was definitely a line where you crossed into Louisiana and people were all about the bait caster, then you crossed another line where they were back into the spinning rod, and then when you went over to Texas, nobody wanted any spinning rods. It was just an interesting thing, because I never understood it — I'm like, so you feel like you can throw a bait caster into a 30-mile-an-hour wind with a weightless plastic as far as I can throw a spinning rod? And some of those guys were like, 'Yep, sure can.' I mean, good for you, because it's going to be a bird's nest with me, but they were 100% dead set on it — didn't see any use for spinning at all. Maybe they just hadn't tried it much. Alright — so, if you had the choice, you either can hunt or you can fish — that's the only thing you can do for the rest of your life. Which is it?

Derek York: Ten years ago, the answer would have been different, but I think hunting would be it now.

Tom Rowland: Hunting?

Derek York: As much as I like to fish.

Tom Rowland: What's your species of choice?

Derek York: Turkeys.

Tom Rowland: Turkeys — right on. Yeah, your turkey hunting would have the rattlesnake part.

Derek York: Yeah, I mean, we have rattlesnakes — a lot of them.

Tom Rowland: I know — we have rattlesnakes too, but in the area I hunt the most, I've never seen a rattlesnake, and that's why it's the area I hunt the most. There's probably more turkeys in other places, but I know there are also rattlesnakes there, so I'm not crazy about that.

Derek York: Yeah — rattlesnakes. Your boys ratted you out when they were over here in Texas, saying that you do not like snakes.

Tom Rowland: I am — I'm not crazy about snakes. I don't have a phobia, but I also don't like poison ivy, and I don't get close to either one of them. It's like, why do you want to mess with it? Why would I want to pick up poison ivy? I could drop it, or fall down and rub it all over myself — I don't want to do that. Somebody was asking me the other day if I had a cure for poison ivy, and I said, 'Yeah — learn how to identify it six feet away and don't go there.' That's my cure for poison ivy — the best one. Don't get there, don't go there. If there's a place to sit, and one tree is all brown with dead leaves around it, and another tree has all this bright green growth around it, I don't even have to identify it — I'm not sitting over there, I want to sit on the brown one. That's just common sense to me, but that common sense only comes from being covered with poison ivy a few times in my life, to where you're like, I'm not doing that again.

Derek York: The worst — my dad just has to get near it and he breaks out. Yeah, man.

Tom Rowland: Some people — I'm not super allergic to it or anything, but I can certainly get it, and it's not fun when you do. But the worst I've seen is when I didn't know that those hairy vines going up the trees were poison sumac or poison something, and I climbed a tree to put up a tree stand and got that stuff all over me, man — all over me. That was really bad. So I don't mess with hairy vines anymore, and I don't sit in bright green vegetation.

Derek York: Yep — that's a good way. Okay.

Wrapping Up

Tom Rowland: Cool, man — well, I appreciate you having the boys down there. I know they had a really good time, and they met some really interesting people and have been telling me all about it. So I hope next year this summit you're doing will continue to grow, and I'd love to come next year — it'd be awesome. But I know there were some great podcasts done there while you guys were there.

Derek York: You know, we had such a wide variety of guests that came — I mean, I know you probably know who was there, but we had a guy from Oklahoma, Todd Craighead, who hosts the Outdoor Oklahoma show, up there. And then we had Lou Murillo, who's a writer for Texas Fish & Game magazine but lives in New York — he also goes by the name Eric Adams, and he's the lead singer for the heavy-metal band Manowar.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Derek York: You know, just — heavy metal and turkey hunting, he's like, 'How the heck does that come together?' But Lou was just an incredible person to have in camp with us, and I know the boys enjoyed getting to talk to him — hopefully they'll get up to New York and do some turkey hunting with him sometime soon.

Tom Rowland: That would be cool — to turkey hunt in New York isn't exactly a place I'd think of as a dream destination, but I've been to upstate New York, around the Lake Placid area, and it looks like there's a lot of good turkey habitat up there.

Derek York: Yep, there should be — there's a lot of birds up there. So, yeah, it's crazy. Next year we're hoping to have more podcasters, more guests come in — we're going to be doing it at a bigger ranch and have a lot more stuff going on. Really looking forward to and super excited about what's to come with the Hunt Fish Podcast deal.

Tom Rowland: Nice, nice — well, I wish you all the luck with it, and it's great catching up with you again today. We'll do it again — but let everybody know how to get a hold of you, how to follow what you're doing.

Derek York: Yeah, absolutely — you can find me at my charter, Spot Stalker Guide Service, or Spot Stalker Fishing on Instagram and Facebook, and Impact Outdoors Podcast on Facebook and Instagram. We're super excited to be part of Waypoint Collective now, and being able to get some great content out — please follow us there and listen to all our interviews.

Tom Rowland: Alright — I'm sure they will. Well, Derek, always nice to catch up with you, and good job on all the kids' work you're doing — that's super important.

Derek York: Thanks, Tom.

Tom Rowland: That'll be it for today, man — we'll catch up again soon.

Derek York: Alright, sounds good. See you. See you.