The N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission voted Thursday at a meeting in Morehead City to keep its cobia fishery open in state waters beyond the federally mandated June 20 closure, going out of compliance with the South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council.
While cobia move into South Carolina’s inshore waters this month, they can still be caught at nearshore and offshore reefs, and anglers fishing those areas usually don’t have to fight the large crowd of boats that line up in St. Helena Sound, the Broad River, and similar inshore haunts.
While Buddy Bizzell usually prefers live or cut menhaden for cobia bait, he said cobia aren’t picky about what they eat. A number of other baits are good choices.
Cobia, rachycentron canadum, are a pelagic fish — they travel the open ocean — but unlike most pelagic species, cobia also inhabit inshore waterways like the Broad River and St. Helena Sound, at least for short periods of time.
May and June offer great opportunities for fishermen who dream of hooking up with a powerhouse, 50-pound cobia just off the beach. But anglers must act fast if they want to get a hookup, because no matter how lazy these fish appear when cruising along the surface, they become less and less catchable every minute a boat is on the scene.
Guide Jot Owens begins seeing cobia off Wrightsville Beach in May, and on a typical day, he will head to the Masonboro Inlet jetties first thing early in the morning and then start running the beach looking for pods of bait and free-swimming cobia. But he can never count on them being in the same place day after day.
Because 2015 was such a fruitful year for North Carolina cobia fishermen, they’ll have a big payback to make in 2016.
South Carolina’s cobia numbers have been on a roller-coaster over the past 10 years after a relatively stable recreational harvest through the 1980s and 1990s.
Blake Michael of Poquoson, Va., knew he was headed to Hatteras earlier this week for the catch of a lifetime, but he didn’t know it would be a doubleheader. Fishing with his buddy, Bryan Nester, this past Thursday, a few days before marrying his “catch-of-a-lifetime” girlfriend, Hailey Hill, Michael landed a 116.2-pound cobia, missing the state record by slightly more than four ounces.
Responding to concerns from the public and data collected by S.C. Department of Natural Resources biologists, the South Carolina General Assembly has passed legislation to help rebuild the state’s cobia fishery. The new cobia regulations, which are effective for the 2016 season after receiving Gov. Nikki Haley’s signature, include a catch-and-release period in May and smaller bag and boat limits.
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