Gore spattered up the captain’s calf as he stomped a mesh bag full of recently netted menhaden in the transom. I was busy at the cutting board, chunking and tossing as quickly as I could.
The net had come up full three times. We had bait to spare, in addition to a frozen chum block tied off the stern. With that oily mess, it didn’t take long. First the spadefish materialized behind the twin 200s. Then a big 10-foot tiger shark rose into view, following its nose in search of something more than measly menhaden heads.
That was our cue. In rapid succession, the crew fired live baits behind the cruising shark. For a few seconds, we watched them flicker in the sun and then, bam, bam, bam! With joyous whoops and whining drags, we began the tripled-up dance. “I love the chaos!” El Capitan hollered. Then he cranked the volume on the “Free Bird” guitar solo.
When it’s on, cobia fishing is fun. This was over a wreck off the South Carolina coast. Even though we weren’t cruising in a tower boat and sight-fishing them in the classic Gulf Coast fashion, it was all very visual, on the surface and action-packed.
Sadly, unless you fish the southern Chesapeake Bay, scenes like this are becoming harder to come by. Catch rates have fallen off in the South Atlantic—off Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina—and there is rising concern in the Gulf of Mexico over a cobia stock that is not rebounding despite increasingly stringent management. Scientists and anglers are scratching their heads.
Where Did Gulf Cobia Go?
For decades the cobia run in the Gulf of Mexico was a rite of spring. Center-consoles with tall towers cruised the beaches in search of cobia. Tournaments grew big time on an exciting fishery, bringing crowds of anglers to the Gulf Coast.
Then it crashed pretty hard.
“It’s definitely alarming,” says Dyan Gibson, a researcher with the Gulf Coast Research Lab at the University of Southern Mississippi. “I know a lot of tournaments have been canceled recently just because the fish aren’t there. And it’s a really big deal along this coast. From the west Florida coast up into the northern Gulf, it’s been almost a tradition for so long. The folks get out and they catch their cobia during the spring run, but they’re just not seeing them now.”
Gibson carries on the work of the Sport Fish Tag and Release Program started in 1988 by recently retired Jim Franks. They, and everyone else, watched with concern as the fishery began a sharp decline in 2013 and 2014. The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council responded by clamping down on recreational allowance. The length limit was raised to 36 inches fork length, and the bag limit was reduced to one per angler, two per boat in federal waters. The Gulf states also tightened regulations in state waters.
Gibson says increasing the length limit was the right move to allow more breeding fish to remain in the population, but the stricter bag limits haven’t been able to make a difference. Gulf anglers aren’t even catching enough cobia to meet new reduced allowances, which were slashed from 4.5 million down to 2.6 million pounds for 2023. She says Gulf cobia are not being overfished, but they are not rebounding as expected.
“For a fish like that, they’re mature in two or three years, and you’d expect them to bounce back a little more quickly, and we’re not seeing that,” she says. “That’s the question. If they’re no longer being overfished, what’s the hold up? What is going on?”
The answer: Nobody knows for sure, but there are theories. Fishermen could have hammered the population—especially the large breeders—so hard that it’s taking more time to recover. Shifting migration patterns could be responsible for fewer angler encounters with cobia, meaning the fish are somewhere—just not where we’re accustomed to catching them.
In light of a booming Chesapeake Bay fishery, the idea has even been floated that Gulf cobia packed their bags and swam to the mid-Atlantic. Gibson says that although a few rare Gulf-tagged cobia have shown up in the Chesapeake over decades of tagging, there is no scientific data to support this mass-evacuation theory.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is another potential culprit. From April 20 to July 15, 2010, 4 million barrels of oil spewed from the seafloor 42 miles off Louisiana. Gibson says the peak spawning season for cobia is May and June, and the swath of coast impacted by the oil spill is an assumed spawning region, where researchers have collected a lot of cobia larvae.
“It might have really dealt a massive blow that we’re still seeing,” she says. “I know that in the water out there, the benthic areas are still pretty toxic.”
The disappearance of this iconic fishery remains a mystery. Over the last five years, researchers have been homing in on techniques and technology for deploying acoustic and satellite tags on cobia. Gibson says they don’t have enough data yet to make any conclusions.
“We’re doing our best to collect as much data as possible and to look at all kinds of factors that could point to why this fish isn’t recovering as fast as it should,” she says. “I know a lot of folks are really concerned, and we’re doing our best to find out.”
What About the South Atlantic?
On a smaller scale, a similar cobia fishery existed in South Carolina, where cobia used to make massive inland spawning runs in the Lowcountry just north of the Georgia border. For decades, scads of cobia pushed into Port Royal Sound, Calibogue Sound, St. Helena Sound and the Broad River. With a May peak, boats cruised the sounds sight-fishing or lined up at anchor to target big egg-bearing females before they had a chance to reproduce.
That fishery had collapsed by 2016, when South Carolina eliminated cobia harvest in May for this spawning region, called the Southern Cobia Management Zone. For the rest of the year, the limit was reduced to one per person, three per vessel in state waters, with a 36-inch fork-length limit. South Carolina began a stocking program to rebuild this genetically distinct subpopulation of the Atlantic cobia stock.
“South Carolina has done a lot of work, but we haven’t seen any amazing rebound yet,” says Spud Woodward, chairman of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Pelagic Management Board.
Woodward says Georgia and South Carolina have experienced declining catches since 2018, and North Carolina catches plummeted from more than 25,000 in 2018 to less than 700 fish total in 2023. Meanwhile, Virginia’s southern Chesapeake Bay is teeming with cobia from spring through summer.
“It appears they’ve responded to changes in ocean conditions and are now frequenting the mid-Atlantic area more,” Woodward says.
Read Next: How to Sight-Fish for Cobia
Shifting Management for a Shifting Population
This past summer, the ASMFC moved away from state-by-state cobia quotas and established regional management. A northern region, from Virginia to Rhode Island, was granted 68.69 percent of the total coastwide recreational quota, with the remaining 31.31 percent going to North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.
Florida’s east coast cobia fishery is not managed by the ASMFC but as part of the Gulf of Mexico stock with a separate annual catch limit. Total reported catches have varied widely each year since 2015, according to federal data, but remain relatively strong.
The reallocation of Atlantic cobia was dramatic, as the three southern-region states previously enjoyed nearly 60 percent of the allowed catch. Paradoxically, the move will result in tighter northern regulations, while the southern regs remain the same. It’s because cobia fishing in Virginia has been so good.
While southern-region states haven’t met annual allotment numbers in recent years, Virginia overran its allocation every year from 2018 to 2023. In two of those years, Virginia alone exceeded the total coastwide allotment twice.
This summer, the northern-zone length limit will rise to 43 inches total length with a vessel limit of two fish. Previously, it was 40 inches in the Chesapeake and 37 inches in states north of Maryland. The open season will extend by five days from June 15 to Sept. 20.
“It will make it more of a challenge to catch a keeper cobia,” says avid angler Ken Neill, who tags cobia for the Virginia Game and Fish Tagging Program. In his early 60s, Neill has fished the Chesapeake all his life and says large numbers of cobia have always been present. He says the boom of the last dozen years is the result of sight-fishing making cobia more fun.
“People just started bringing more southern fishing techniques up to the bay, and I guess found it more exciting cruising around looking for them than sitting on a chum slick,” he says. “You’ll see tons and tons of center-consoles with towers on any given day in the summertime. They will be out there cruising around looking for them.”
With tight regulations, the Chesapeake fishery is already mostly catch-and-release, and studies show cobia have high post-release survival rates. Neill says there’s a strong conservation ethos among the locals, and that they are seeing a whole lot of fish from May into October.
“It’s not untypical to go out and catch double digits of cobia and be home for lunch,” he says. “There’ll be a lot of small fish around, and out of those 10 to 12 fish before lunch, they’ll be a couple of keepers. When it gets really good later in the year, when they really pod up and you can see them, people will be catching 30 or 40 in a day, so it can be really crazy.”
Neill thinks the regulations are probably overly strict, but he doesn’t mind because it allows anglers to keep fishing.
Woodward advises caution.
“Don’t shut down your fishery; enjoy your opportunity,” he says. “But we need to think about what the consequences might be when you put that much pressure on that localized fishery. We’ve got two case histories (Gulf and South Carolina) of how vulnerable cobia can be to overfishing, and we need to bear that in mind, I think.”
