How to Catch Cobia

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These awesome fish can look like a shark till you see the lateral line - but they fight and taste like few fish in the sea.
The first time I saw a cobia I thought it was a shark. I was around 14, and had been fishing here a couple of years. Catching trout in cold streams is a very beautiful thing, and one that's still burned in my memory and my love for the sport as any snook, tarpon, or wahoo that's burned out expensive equipment. I could probably still tie a decent nymph if I had to. But that day in Anclote Key, when that three-foot-long thing slammed a pinfish we had under a bobber for redfish, I knew I wasn't in Pennsylvania anymore. We lost the fish in about twelve seconds. The drag was way too tight, we were two kids with no idea of what we were doing, and the fish went on to live his short life.

Finding Cobia

When temperatures are high enough, cobia start showing up all over inshore waters. Like all fish, cobia behave in a certain way. The way they act and the kind of bait they're likely to eat are somewhat easy to forecast. Finding cobia and learning how to catch cobia is fairly easy as long as you keep these things in mind. Remember: knowing how to catch cobia is only half the battle; being ready to catch them (if and when you do find them) is what we're going to focus on. But for now, let's think like a cobia for a moment. If you think like a cobia, you're going to think about a few simple things.
  • Where do I find food? Where is food, and how can I get there.
  • How can I eat food with the least amount of effort? I'm big, slow, and quite frankly pretty lazy. I'll leave the stupid part out. I'm just a kid, after all. I ain't a 40" snook that knows what colors are in the latest line of MirroLures.

What Do Cobia Eat

Cobia love crabs most of all. In fact, that's what the old-timers called them: Crab Eaters. A wonderful and fairly repeatable way to catch them year in and year out is to put a quarter or half of a blue crab in the surf with enough weight to keep it pinned to the bottom. They run the troughs along the beach as they move north in the springtime and south in the fall. But they love pinfish, and they love eels. Pinfish you can find, eels made of plastic are what we're going to talk about in a minute; they're arguably the easiest way to catch cobia if you didn't have the time or forethought to put four-inch pinnies in your live well.
Like any opinion, this is only worth my butt, (and will be challenged by the editor), but when I think of teaching people how to catch cobia, the following baits -- and in the following order -- come to mind:
  1. Blue crab
  2. Live pinfish
  3. Big plastic eels
  4. Live threadfin or whitebait
  5. Anything that wiggles, especially if it smells bad

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