I saw a huge cobia laying under a fat gal floating on an air mattress in the surf one time. Was only 50 yards out or so in 4 feet of water. She never knew it was there. It was laying in her shade.

I have heard others say the same thing but I am not convinced. The fish we used to see here had HUGE females in the aggregate. I have personally seen at least a dozen that easily topped 100 lbs and caught one that did. I have seen hundreds that topped 80 lbs. Those fish never were and still aren't seen anywhere else in U.S. waters. They have been seen in southern Atlantic waters (Africa and Brazil). I tend to think the ridiculous local destruction of that aggregate of fish has finally taken too heavy of a toll. I think a March through May total closure in FL and AL Gulf waters is the only hope of saving it. It might even be too late for that to work.

Cobia grow incredibly fast. 13-17" year one and they are 28-35" by year two. They could shut down the recreational fishery for 4 years and you'd have your answer. There'd either be hoards of 35-60 pounders and smaller fish all over the beach, or there wouldn't. Like I said in a post above, we saw hundreds of 28-31" fish all over FADS, that were sunk well offshore last year. More than I've ever seen. Problem might just be that too many big females have been caught. LSU did a study and 85% of fish over 40" were females. Takes 3 yrs for a female to reach sexual maturity. With the lower limits and a 33" fork length for years, and everyone wanting a big fish to keep, might be that too many big females were harvested and taken out of the mix and it'll take a while to replace them. I'd give up 3-5 yrs of chasing them if it meant things would be back to the way they used to be before I turned 60 and got too old to climb up in a tower and chase them. Right now, all youre doing on most days is getting sunburnt, and wasting fuel.

I’ve lived it and breathed it. Trust me, the coastlines of SC and NC are loaded in May. I fish the west delta in September and October. No shortage there either. I do agree that you don’t see the giant females anymore.

My point was we never saw them that size anywhere but here. I've caught them for decades here, in La, and in the Atlantic too but not the size we saw here in April. Not even close. I believe the giant females we saw here were a different aggregate of cobia.

I agree 100 percent.

I think those huge female cobia we used to see were just like the huge female bass in the spring. I think in both cases, the cobia were old genetically superior fish just like the mid-high teen bass that used to come out of south Bama and the FL panhandle on a fairly regular basis. Both were severely overfished, harvested and kept (nobody was into catch and release back then), and there simply are not many around anymore like there used to be. Genes are still there but just like with big deer and big bass, it takes the right one getting enough age on it to reach full maturity and there are too many people fishing them and catching them before they can reach that size. I can remember the days when you'd have 3-4 boats working east or west, each holding their line, and you could go for miles without having to move off that line for another boat. Now you've got 20 boats, working in and out in one direction and 50 boats coming from the other and rarely is there any point in time that I cannot knock the gel coat off someone else's boat with a 3 oz cobe jig if I wanted to. I think the big females are not there because they are all getting caught at 40-60lbs. The pressure on them is 100X what it was back in the early and mid eighties and nineties. Same with the bass, I still catch way more than my share of 10+ but I might see one fish every 3-4 years that will go in the teens. 20 boats with towers looking on every lake in south Alabama and NW FL. 2000 boats, scattered from Orange Beach to Appalachicola, cruising the beaches looking for cobia every sunny day with a good SE wind .

Last year was a banner year for me. I didnt catch either one but I saw a bass that was pushing 16-17 and I saw a cobia that was 85-90. Bass was just cruising in 8-10 ft of water and the cobia was cruising west about 5 miles offshore. Saw the bass twice that day but she was always cruising just off a big flat and never set up so I never made a cast on her. Was working east late in the afternoon 5-6 miles out, with the sun at my back and the cobia popped up riding a wave west about 70 yds south of the boat. Made a perfect cast and dropped an eel about 10 ft in front of her her nose. Eel dove and she rolled and went down after it but missed it. Hit the MOB and circled back around, got back on the same line going west and found her again about 300 yds further west. Was planning to pace along beside her and pitch her a fin clipped mullet but she went down before I got in range and never could find her again. It was good to see both fish, even though neither were caught.

Always an awesome sight to see a 90 lb cobia cruising in the sun on top. I actually have had good luck getting those big fish that won't eat a live natural bait to hit a jig tipped with squid. I guess it is a reaction strike. Now, getting that jig to stick in a 90+ lb cobia is nearly impossible. They grab it and hold it in the "crab crunchers" part of their mouth and you aren't doing squat trying to set the hook. When they tire of that, they just spit it out. I had one that had to be 140+ eat a jig twice but I had no luck hooking her. We had caught a 103 the day before and this fish absolutely dwarfed the 103. She turned her nose up at a live eel and a live pigfish that was grunting like crazy. I threw the jig at her and she had to have it.

I too believe those big fish have been decimated but I always wondered where they were coming from and where they disappeared to after April. They were not coming from the Keys or the East coast, nor were they coming from anywhere else in U.S. waters. This has to be true because they were never seen anywhere but here. They did not push on to Louisiana because they didn't see them over there. They WERE encountered in South Atlantic (Africa, Brazil) waters but in remote regions where news of them didn't get out often. It seems to me we had a North/South migration of those big girls each year and they traveled a long way.

What’s strange is in the sixties, seventies, and early eighties we had a fabulous cobia run along the Gulf Coast in April but for the amount of fish we caught, we didn’t catch many really big fish. We caught plenty in the 60lb range but not many giants. It wasn’t til the 90’s that giants started being caught regularly along the Gulf Coast.

I remember some ninety pound fish in the seventies and eighties but the 100+ lb fish did appear in the 90s. And quite a few of them.

Very true and by around 2000 or so, for whatever reason, those big fish were pretty much completely gone except for the rare monster fish here and there. I read somewhere that those 100 pounders are 13-15 yrs old. If that is the case and one hits 35-40 lbs around 3 yrs, it could be pressure and harvest related. Hard to survive and not end up on ice before you get fully grown, if you're swimming down the beach getting thrown at for 8-10 springs in a row. Serious fishing pressure on the cobia really started ramping up in the mid-late 90's and got really bad, IMO, around 2005 or so, and has just gotten worse since. Everybody has a tower or nest on their boat now. I can remember complaining to someone sometime around 2005 or 2006 (just before the global financial crisis) about how bad the cobia fishing had gotten and that I had fished from Watercolor all the way to the Navarre pier that day and only saw 7 fish and the biggest one was only 70. Man what i wouldnt give for those days now. Got a close friend that is a captain out of destin. He told me this past year that if he hadnt hooked for his clients and caught for himself, probably 5000 cobia in his lifetime, he'd swear that he was going blind and just couldnt see them anymore. I told him you cant see what's not there and he just laughed and said youre right.

Funny thing is, the big bass have suffered the same fate and followed almost the exact same time frame of decline, from abundance to just a few, and the same with the fishing pressure on them. Only difference being that it started 10 yrs earlier, than it did for the cobia. I think the big bass production peaked in the late 70s early 80's and the Bassmaster article on bed fishing and the 18 pounder in Hurricane really brought the pressure to the panhandle and SA lakes. Everyone wanted one for the wall and there were plenty there for the taking back then. I watched 2 guys from Louisiana loading up at Hurricane one day in the mid-late 80s and they had 7 or 8 fish on a stringer tied off to their boat, from 8 to probably 11 pounds. I asked them why they were keeping them all, and they said they wanted to get them all mounted on a stringer. LOL. I was guiding some at the time and that was the day that I decided that my guiding was contributing to exactly that was happening and that I was helping ruin the fishery. I quit guiding and haven't kept a big one since that very day.

I was at Lake Jackson in late 70s, two men had 5 fish from 10-13 pounds in a cooler.

5000 cobia! Just about had to be Tommy Browning or Frank Helton.

Abolt , we fished Hurricane and several others mid 70’s to late 80’s pretty hard and saw and caught lots of Big Sow B.A.S.S. in Feb and March. Had a buddy who was a guide . We actually dipped up a 15 lb’er floating on her side one night but couldn’t revive her. My buddy got her mounted. We kept way to many 10 plus lb fish the first few yrs before we realized how we were hurting the sow ‘s and lakes. We released all big bass after that other then a few my buddies clients wanted to keep. Lots of pressure on those lakes when we quit fishing them.

Little known secret but in the 90s, for about 4-5 years, IMO the best big bass lake in the south for fish from 10-15lbs, in the spring was the State Lake in Millry, AL. First afternoon I sight fished it, I had 5 for 46 lbs. I used to fish and part time guide in the spring on Hurricane, Bear, Karick, Victor, Juniper, King, Holley, Brooks Hines, bunch of the sand hill ponds just south of the Bama line and north of Panama City, all those. Never guided anyone on Millry because I didnt want the word to get out about it. It was that good. Hurricane did get crazy after that bassmaster article. It would be lit up like Bryant Denny stadium on a Saturday night with all the spotlights. Got so you didnt have to worry about running your trolling motor batteries down. If you wanted to check the other side of the lake, you could just walk boat to boat all the way over there. It got absolutely hammered. Heck, they all did.

Do y’all remember when Robert Dunsford caught a 17.6 out of Hurricane Lake. He told me it wasn’t the biggest bass on that particular bed! I think it was a Florida line class record for awhile.

Yep. That's the 18 pound fish that I was referencing above. Scale actually showed her being just a hair over 18 when she was first brought into the boat. There were actually 3 females on that bed. A 13, the 18 and one that he felt was over 20 and possibly a WR. The 13 picked up his bait and he actually pulled it away from her and the 18 hit it when she dropped it. When he actually got it officially weighed, it had lost a few ounces and was in the 17s. That was the fish that the Bassmaster Article that I referenced above was written about and what brought the end to the really big Hurricane fish. Him, Willard Rhodes, and Randy Fields (caught at 17.2 out of King) lived on those fish, day and night from late Jan through the end of April. I was in middle school, HS and college when it was really good and while my dad had taught me well and I could find and catch them better than most men by that time, man what I would give or pay, to be able to go back in time, knowing what I know now.

I cobia fished with the guy that did all the conservation for Hurricane lake back then. He was responsible for shocking fish and collecting data. He showed me a picture of a 20.3lb bass that he shocked and released in Hurricane. He begged me to keep it quiet. He said that every bass fisherman in the country would be here trying to catch him. The fish was massive. I’ll check with him and see if he still has the picture.

What county would that have been?

Lake Jackson is near Tallahassee. It was well known for its big bass in the 70’s.