This FishyBoys Adventure started in Pensacola Beach, Florida where we boarded Keith’s boat the Click Through and headed out to search the local waters for migrating cobia just offshore. In April of every year there is a mass cobia migration when these cobia first travel north along the West coast of Florida and then turn West along the panhandle and cruise all the way to the oil rigs off Louisiana and Texas where they eventually spawn in late spring and early summer.
during this time of year cobia fishing is a combination of hunting and fishing as the cobia will swim near the surface and we use anglers in the tower to spot them first (the hunting part) and then maneuver the boat into position to intercept their path and get the bait or fly in front of them for the take. Even though eels aren’t naturally found in the waters off Pensacola, for some reason the cobia love them and will usually take a well presented eel multiple times if you don’t get the hook into them on the first try.
The fishing is typically better when there is a bit of an East wind as that wind direction helps the cobia get on the surface and surf the waves in the direction of their migration without expending as much energy as plain ol’ swimming.
In fly fishing for the cobia, the strategy is to throw an unhooked eel at them in order to tease them in close enough to the boat to do a “bait and switch” and then throw a fly on them when you pull the eel out of the water in front of them.
When hooked, these fish are great fighters and it’s not uncommon to get multiple hook ups if you have multiple anglers on the boat.
Cobia are some of the best table fare fish that swim and since they are usually only caught in good numbers during this time of year, the fishing area can get a little crowded at times which makes for some interesting boat management and angler encounters on the water as you’ll see in the second half of the video.
After fun fishing for the cobia for a couple of days, we moved the boat down to Destin, Fl. and entered the “Wild Weekender” tournament that is held there every year. The seas came up a bit and even though we did see and catch some decent browns, the biggest ones we saw managed to slip past us and the other boats in the area didn’t miss the opportunity to jump all over our fish right in our prop wash. Needless to say, we weren’t real happy with the lack of sportmanship but it wasn’t a bad tournament overall.
If you have never experienced cobia fishing before (or eaten them for that matter) , it’s definately worth a trip down to the Florida Panhandle in April to get into these great sport fish. We hope you enjoy the video and please feel free to leave any comments or submit any questions that you might have.