April 7, 2005 Issue

Until May 10th this columnist will be engaged in the pursuit of cobia and will be forced to curtail the normal scope and intellectual intensity of the subjects covered.

The Cobia World Championships began March 19th as the typical spring weather began its assault on the Florida Panhandle. After a warm winter we suffered through a series of cold fronts and brutal northwest winds. The water temperature in the Gulf dropped to 62 degrees when it should have been going in the other direction. The few days that brought strong southeast winds also brought over a foot of rain. The warm days with sunshine and good visibility came with cold, strong northwest winds. The cobia are migrating to the west and while an easterly wind causes them to ride the helpful surface currents, a west wind forces them to swim along the bottom instead of bucking a cold, tough chop on the inshore waters of the Gulf Coast.

The cobia fishermen out of Destin go through the same scenario every spring. After the initial buildup and the arrival of the first fish (which can be anywhere between March 1 and April 1) the captains and crews have the same worries. Is it going to be a decent year? Are there going to be big fish? Will there be wads of fish like there were 10 years ago? And after several days of tough fishing and very few cobia, the most frightening questions of all: What if they never show up? What if we’ve killed them all?

Several cobia were spotted the first week in March and finally on March 23rd the first fish was brought to our scales at Harbor Docks.

Because of the intensity of the cobia season in Destin and the competitive nature of our fleet, the cobia fishery is closely watched. Jim Franks, the world’s foremost expert on cobia, visits us several times every spring to take samples from our catches. He has assured us that with the strict bag limits of one fish per person and a maximum of six per boat this fishery will remain vibrant and strong.

Even so, migratory fish like cobia appear in huge numbers some years and are scarce in others. One aspect of these fish that has always bothered me is the redundancy with which they are caught.

Through Franks’ tagging program we have been able to track hundreds of the fish passing through the northern Gulf of Mexico. My boat alone has caught nearly a dozen fish that had been tagged at least a year earlier. To catch so many previously tagged king mackerel or black fin tuna would be unheard of. This repeated catching of the same fish shows that in addition to not being particularly brilliant, the fish we see are the same ones that migrate through here year after year.

Today is April 4 and we caught two of the three fish we saw. We also spent an hour fighting a 500-plus pound Mako shark off of Navarre that was hunting the same quarry as we were.

Normally, with the water temperature at 68 degrees and a light southerly breeze, we would have expected to see more than three fish on a sunny day the first week of April. An 86.3-pound fish caught on the Full Pull is currently leading the World Championships. The Enterprise and the Un Reel are in second and third with fish in the 60-pound range. By the end of our tournament on May 9th none of these fish will be on the leader board. We might not have 13 fish over a 100 pounds like we did in 1996, but I feel certain there will a few big ones caught this spring.

In the meantime David “Goose” Strong and myself will be wandering along the coast from Seagrove Beach to Pensacola trying to locate the biggest cobia ever seen. Since we’ve been fishing together for more than 10 years and have almost nothing left to talk about, no subjects that we haven’t covered before, we’ll try not to worry whether or not they’ll show up this year. We’ll stay positive, and poised. We’ll let the small ones swim on and complete a successful migration. But if the right one comes along, the big fat one that we think about every time we ready our tackle and rig the live eels, the one that we look for every time we climb that tower, the 140-pound fish we have imagined spotting so many times coasting down that southeast swell we have stared at for too many springs to count—we’re going to catch it.

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