Virginia Beach Fishing Report, Matador Charters Cobia Fishing Hatteras

05/21/10 - Today we had John Lawson aboard for a cobia trip. We started out where the fish had been and the fish just weren't there. It was calm and sunny, great conditions but the water was a bit too cool at 67 degrees where the fish had been in 71 degrees earlier in the week. Thinking the fish may have been to the south we pushed south all the way to Drum Inlet. We saw 3 or 4 fish on the way there but nothing special that we could have had a shot at. At Drum Inlet we found a nice ball of menhaden that had 5 cobia on top of it. Evidently EVERYONE had seen these 5 cobia and they did not want anything to eat after being pestered half the morning. We watched them a while and started our way north. We put some trolling lines out while we were looking and managed to catch a nice mess of spanish mackerel and bluefish. One spanish was 5#, which is huge for a spanish. Continuing north we saw a turtle up top that had cobias under it. We got a good cast on a large 70#ish fish that bit only the back half of the lure off just behind the hook. Bad luck. We saw a couple more fish under turtles that were tough to get to bite and finally at Ocracoke Inlet we found a decent number of fish near the shoals in the warm clear water coming out of the sound. Soon after we had our first one on deck. We saw a bunch more and had some bites but just a string of bad luck prevented us from having more fish. We had 4 or 5 fish in a row where we had solid hooksets and the hook just came unglued after being hooked for 20 or 30 seconds. We had fish follow the bait, swallow it and spit it in a flash, and we could have had more fish but we just didnt. Either way, it was a beautiful day and in the end we saw around 30 cobia, hooking 5 and catching 1.