Cobia fishing the lower Chesapeake Bay in August is less like fishing than like birdwatching from a stepladder in the middle of a very large parking lot. The boats working down around the mouth of the bay run aluminum towers ten or twelve feet above the deck, and the crew climbs up there and stands in the sun with polarized glasses and a rod, staring at water the color of weak tea. The bridge sits out on the horizon in the heat haze like a pencil line somebody drew and then forgot about. Nothing happens for a long time. It is, for whole hours at a stretch, the most boring form of hunting anyone has ever invented, and people drive six hours to do it.
What you are looking for is a shape, and the shape is the problem. At two hundred feet a cobia looks like a small shark, a small shark looks like a cobia, and both of them look a great deal like a floating chunk of dock piling. The tell is in the swimming. A cobia sculls along with a lazy roll and a dark stripe down the flank, and about half the time it has company, because cobia in the Chesapeake like to ride the cownose rays that come through in squadrons the size of dinner plates. Find the rays, look behind them, and there is often a brown escort tucked in the wash, going nowhere in particular, waiting for somebody else to stir up lunch.
The captain who ran us has been standing on a tower since he was a teenager and has the neck to prove it. He does not talk while he is looking. He gets very quiet, and when the quiet breaks it breaks all at once. "Left side, coming, do not point at him." Pointing, apparently, is the great sin up there, because a raised arm and a shadow will send a curious cobia straight down into the tea-colored nothing. The other rule he gave us was on the way out and he only gave it once. "You get one cast. He looks at that eel and he either wants it or you have spent the fish."
Ours came up on the port bow at about eleven in the morning, riding a ray like a man on a slow escalator. The cast landed a rod length ahead of him, the eel sank, and the fish covered ten feet without hurrying and ate it the way you would take a sandwich off a plate. Then he woke up. The first run of a cobia is unimpressive and lulls you nicely. The second run is a legal matter. We got him to the boat twice before he was ready, and when he finally came over the gunwale green, he redecorated the cockpit, launched a tackle tray into the bay, and put a lasting dent in a perfectly good cooler lid.
We ran back in that afternoon with sunburned ears, one fish on ice, and a considerable amount of nothing else. By the honest accounting, the day held about eleven minutes of fishing and eight hours of standing on a ladder. That is the exact rate the lower bay charges for a cobia, and nobody in four hundred years has managed to talk it down.