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.
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.
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.
It’s cobia season, and while this year’s will be a shortened version thanks to new federal regulations, plenty of anglers will be lining up in St. Helena Sound fishing for “the man in the brown suit.”
Wrightsville Beach may be known as a world-class surfing destination or as the most socially accepted stretch of white sand along the entire east coast. But for anglers ready to tame a world-class fish, the crystal blue waters along these stunning shorelines are just what the doctor ordered, and there’s no better time than this month, when the annual cobia run begins. Massive, breeder cobia snuggle along the coastline, famished and ready to fill up the tank on anything they can find.
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