Cobia regulations need improvement

All I hear these days is cobia, cobia, and cobia. I won’t even hazard a guess on how many emails and phone calls I’ve had asking me what the heck is going on with the cobia regulations.

I will quickly comment on the regulations and what I would have done had I been chosen to make changes to the existing regulations.

On the state level, I think they are spot-on. It’s the federal changes that I have an issue with. As of June 20, no cobia may be harvested in state or federal waters for the remainder of the year.

If it were up to me, instead of closing the fishery down altogether, I would have changed the limits on how many fish anglers could keep. My second option would have been to designate cobia as a game fish, thus making it illegal to buy or sell these great fish.

I have always thought that two fish per person is ridiculous. Though the majority of fisherman I know are conservation-minded, there are those who stray outside the reasonable and take all they can get — and do it over and over again.

I am not against keeping a cobia or two, but when anglers load their boat up with people so they can legally keep as many fish as they can catch, that’s what takes my blood pressure up a dozen notches. With that sticking in my craw, I would change the limit on cobia to one per person along with a boat limit of three per boat.

Ideally, it would be great to have a slot limit where females over a certain size must be released, but from experience, that would be nearly impossible. Cobia are powerful fish, and trying to get one to stay still while you measure it would keep hospital emergency rooms packed with folks with broken legs and concussions.

One more footnote: The DNR is still in need of live, true Port Royal genetic cobia for breeding.

The big Port Royal female I caught last year that I named Alice (after my granddaughter) is up in Charleston being romanced as I speak. One female can produce as many as 2 million eggs, so should she put on a touch of Chanel No. 5 and woo her two male suitors, those offspring will help bounce back the cobia population in Port Royal Sound.

Encounter with an unknown fish

Heading to the Gulf Stream last Saturday with Grant Kaple from the Hilton Head Boathouse, we whacked the dolphin pretty good. There was a rip where two currents meet, making the water look like it’s boiling. In that boiling mess there were huge rafts of Sargasso weed and flotsam, but also something I have never seen before.

I am not sure what kind of fish they were — maybe tinker mackerel — but all along the rip were massive pods of these fish that stretched for miles. Imagine what water would look like if you were to put a giant vibrator just under the surface. The water was dancing and, every so often, some predator would blast through the bait pods, sending the rest running for their lives. It was awesome!

With a box full of dolphin, we even took time to try a bit of bottom fishing and though both grouper and snapper are out of season, we caught and released a number of both species, including a beautiful grouper with blue spots that I was unable to identify.

Hammerhead shark puts on a show

Then on Monday I went fishing with Jon Harrigan. Talk about a show — we had one straight out of a National Geographic special. Fishing on one of our offshore reefs, I put out a live menhaden on top of the water and, though I often see huge sharks, this time a great hammerhead that was easily 15 feet long showed up. Its dorsal fin was easily 2 feet tall and when it saw that menhaden swimming on the surface, it was game on.

Like a dumbo, I didn’t video the encounter as that menhaden tried to dodge this monster for a good 30 seconds. The graceful moves of the hammerhead had me mesmerized. It made hairpin turns, his entire hammer out of the water, and the shark’s sheer power blew me away. Jon had never seen a shark this big before, but I guarantee he will never forget this incredible up-close and personal show.

Needless to say, the shark won, but these are the types of scenes I have come to expect every time I head out to sea. And you know what? They are also what will keep me going out there until either my body says “no” or the Grim Reaper pays me a visit. But even then, I’ll be kicking and screaming all the way.

This story was originally published May 6, 2016 at 10:53 PM with the headline "Cobia regulations need improvement."