Cobia is available all around Florida throughout the entire year, especially during the fall when they migrate back to Floria sea waters. These live in schools along with ray fish and anglers, can easily spot them where ray fishes are in abundance. To locate them, one can reach the clearwater beach of Florida. Tampa is the nearest airport and just 22 miles far away from clearwater beach. One can easily reach the clearwater beach through the Courtney Campbell causeway also. The advantage is one can visit a lot of nearby backwaters and the Tampa beach for fishing and clearwater beach is not the only spot here. Nowadays they are using drone fishing for easily locating cobia schools along the seas which have to be done after getting due permission from the authorities.
Types of fish that can be found
A massive population of common snook, King and Spanish Mackerel, Black Drum, Tarpons, Red Drum, Gag Grouper, Mangrove Snapper, and Hog snapper can be caught here.
Type of fishing that can be done at the location
Boat fishing gives the advantage of a good catch as far as Cobia is concerned. The advantage of fishing is clearwater beach is that there are numerous backwaters and the Tampa beach very near. Here fishers can use plenty of bait types like scaled sardines, ladyfish, pinfish, grass grunts, and threadfin herring. Chumming the waters is easy here using live sardines as fish schools fastly follow these. Artificial baits are also used here.
The fish can grow up to a maximum length of 2 m weighing around 78kg, and a record has been reported of 100 pounds. The meat of the fish is regarded high in taste, and catching the fish is quite a challenging experience for the anglers. The younger one grows fastly into an adult within one year to eighteen months period.
It has a range from West to East Atlantic ocean up to entire Carribean seas and the Indian ocean. Its presence extends from coastal India, Australia till the pacific coast of Japan. It does not shy away from boats. In the US its range starts from Nova Scotia to Argentina in Atlantic waters and up to the Chesapeake Bay south till the Gulf of Mexico.
The fish prefers solitary settlements except during the spawning season. It resides on congregates of reefs, buoys, wrecks and structural oases. They are found in large number in estuaries of rivers and mangrove areas. All over the world, these are commonly found in continental shelves and offshore reefs.
The primary food of this fish is squid and crab apart from small fish types. It follows large fishes like the shark to get the remnants of their prey. They feed on large numbers of eels and shrimp. Anglers mostly use mullet, menhaden, and pinfish as baits and bucktail jigs as lures. The fish gets attracted easily by colorful lures and baits.