Check out our Multispecies Fishing at Artificial Reefs on Chesapeake Bay video, and know that most of the action you'll see here came at Tilghman Reef.

This site, about 1.5 miles due west of Tilghman Island, is an area filled with CCA Maryland reef balls, Ocean City Reef Foundation pyramids, concrete bridge rubble, and wreckage. It covers a relatively vast area (state records put it at 84 acres) with varying depths ranging from 15’ to 25’. There’s room here for multiple boats to get in on the action and depending on the season holds good numbers of spot, croaker, flounder, rockfish, and black sea bass. (Plus oyster toads… way too many oyster toads). It’s also common for bluefish and Spanish mackerel to be found patrolling the upper levels of the water column here. The reef is clearly marked with a box on all but the most basic digital charts, but as with most reefs, some areas are hotter than others. Here are some of the highlights we’ve found at Tilghman Reef through the years, ranked by how productive we’ve found them.

tilghman reef fishing hotspot chart
Match up the numbers ID'd here with the fishing hotspots below.
  1. This area seems to have the heaviest concentration of structure, including lines of big reef balls mixed with bridge decking. It’s snaggy and you’ll pay a steep price for drifting here, but anchor up or Spot-Lock and you’ll hook into any or all of the species present. Try it and we’ll bet this zone quickly becomes a favorite.
  2. There’s a relatively narrow band of rubble running mostly north-south in this area. Last fall it was the best spot on the reef for black sea bass, producing keepers until the weather got cold and the fish moved to deeper waters.
  3. The central southern area has some reef balls but more bridge rubble, and it’s distributed a bit more sparsely than in the first two areas. It’s possible to drift fish and/or bounce jigs along bottom here (you’ll still lose rigs but not at quite the same pace as you would at the other spots). Last season roving pods of stripers could be caught throughout this area and it also produced lots of (small) flounder.
  4. There’s a wreck in this area plus wreckage with some appearing to lie outside of the charted boundaries of the reef. We just discovered this one on the most recent trip here and didn’t catch much on it, but it looks great on the side-scan and we’d bet it will prove productive at one time or another.
  5. As best we can tell this spot is a false flag operation — it looks great on the electronics with lots of circular marks widely disbursed over a large area, but we’ve tried drifting it several times with zero results. Historical record shows that tire units were once placed at this reef and it seems reasonable to guess that the units broke apart (they commonly do after a decade or two), leaving scattered tires across the bottom.

 Reef GPS coordinates: 38’41”33.09 x 76’22”39.15 (center)

Tilghman Reef Fishing Tactics

  • Spot and croaker – Bloodworm or Fishbites bits on a Chesapeake Sabiki rig.
  • Rockfish – Bounce jigs just above bottom or liveline spot.
  • Black sea bass –Tip one-ounce single-hook jigging spoons like G-Eye Rain Minnow with Fishbites shrimp or crab flavor bait strips, and dangle them just off bottom/structure.
  • Flounder and toadfish – You’ll catch them by accident on all of the above.