The satisfied angler had all the elements come together after scanning the grassflats for rays laden with cobia along a sandy edge.

Sorting through stingrays, looking for the right one that might hold cobia, is like sorting through the mail looking for checks—lots of junk to sift through before you find a prize. And that’s how it was on a calm Tampa Bay afternoon as Capt. Ernie Rubio answered “wrong kind” to every ray I pointed to as we slow-motored our way along the margins of a grassflat just off a seawalled St. Petersburg shoreline.

Rubio was standing on his center console to gain a height advantage, steering the boat by reaching back with his bare foot, gripping the wheel between his toes. We were looking for cobia, and to find them on the flats starting in early April and lasting through the summer, one need only find a southern sting-ray “mudding” through the grass, flapping its wings, creating a vacuum vortex that sucks bottom-hugging food items up out of the grass. Other rays like bat rays and cow-nose rays were plentiful, and big skates drew a glance, but they were all true-to-form non-producers.

We were looking for a real southern ray, one with a cobe or two hard-wired to its back waiting to chase crabs or small fish skittering from under the flapping wings. If we were really lucky, we would come across a conga line of cobia following a big leopard ray or manatee, each cobia darting to the front to sniff out a meal, then falling back in line.

Finally, I spied what I thought might be the right brand of stingray. With a lazy flutter of its wings, this lone ray was moving through air-clear, 2-foot-deep water, slowly flapping his way across the top of the grass without stirring the mud. I focused and pointed with my rod toward the ray, and Rubio answered my silent gesture with, “That’s what we’re looking for.” But, I saw no cobia. Nada. Junk mail.

I glanced back at Rubio with a disappointed wrinkle on my face and let my arms go limp, but as soon as he noticed my lack of action he barked a frantic machine-gun command: “Put the bait on his back! On his back! Put it on his back!”

Seems that Rubio forgot to explain to me that since the cobia’s dark brown color closely matches the color of the southern ray, they’re quite difficult to see when outlined against the ray’s back and will stand out best when seen against green grass or white sandy bottom. Rubio’s experienced eye had found our quarry.

I obeyed his command and flipped a live sardine onto the ray’s back and watched as the sardine dashed away from the ray. In an instant the sleek brown shark-like figure that I had overlooked torpedoed away from the ray, gobbled the bait, and quickly returned to riding shotgun on the ray’s starboard wing. I set the hook hard, and after enjoying a couple of long and powerful runs on 20-pound spin gear, I thumb-lipped—then released—the juvenile 30-inch “brown bomber” and the day was sufficiently under way. It was nearly noon.

Chasing rays for cobia is one of the few fishing adventures when you don’t have to dynamite yourself out of bed at O-dark-hundred. Quite the opposite. Cobia are hard to find until the sun gets up a ways. Earlier that morning, I had felt out of place sitting at Gandy Bait and Tackle, swapping lies with the regulars till 10 a.m. when my guide finally appeared. But Rubio soon explained that we would have been wasting our time in the hours where the sun is at a low angle to the water. Most fishermen that I know wouldn’t be caught dead wading around the flats at two in the afternoon, when the sun’s glare tends to chase snook and redfish into deeper water. But cobia don’t seem to be put off by shallow water and bright skies, opting to follow their meal tickets onto the flats whenever the sun is high and higher tides flood the grassy flats of Tampa Bay.

If the sun is a friend to cobia fishermen on the flats, wind is their worst enemy. This is sight fishing at the extreme and a riled-up surface makes it darn near impossible to see the fish. When the perfect circumstances of clear water, bright sun and calm surface come together in April, May and June, Rubio and most other West Coast inshore guides think cobia on the flats.

Cobia fishing is partly responsible for the recent popularity of inshore tower boats, with the height advantage of a tower greatly increasing the distance of sight as well as the ability to see through surface glare with polarized sunglasses. Panhandle cobia fishermen have long understood this and any self-respecting cobia hunter from the Big Bend to Pensacola has added a tower to his offshore boat. The make-do height advantage Rubio gained while standing on his center console was only temporary, as he was having a tower built for his boat the day we fished. The following day he invited his friend and full-time cobia guide Capt. Ed Walker to bring his tower boat along to compare cobia catches that could be made with and without a tower boat.

“It’s a lot safer than standing barefoot on a slippery center console, not to mention much higher,” said Walker from his tower. “Lots of inshore guides have followed the lead of Panhandle fishermen and gone to tower boats.” Walker says he has spotted cobia on rays as small as a medium pizza, so he’s convinced the tower boat is the only way to go when cobia hunting.

“As for the other rays, I’ve never seen cobia on cow-nosed or bat rays—never,” says Walker. “On a spotted eagle ray, occasionally, but seldom on the flats. Now a manta ray, there’s a cobia magnet if there ever was one. Problem is, I haven’t seen a real manta ray in the Gulf in 15 years.” The last true manta ray Walker saw was at the Indian Rocks Pier, and when it swam the length of the pier, everyone with a rod hooked a cobia.

No sooner had Walker mentioned manatees than we came upon a mother and her calf, lazily moving along a sandy bottom in 12 feet of water. I spotted them first, and said, “There’s a mother and two pups, but I don’t see any cobia with them.” Walker and Rubio echoed each other as they sprang into action, grabbing for tackle. “That’s not two pups, that’s a pup and a 40-pound cobia.”

Rubio and I quickly had a live bait in the water, right on top of the trio of dark shadows. Walker followed with a pink 8-inch plastic eel. For half an hour we pitched every imaginable bait in front of that big cobia and couldn’t draw a strike. It came up for a sniff several times, causing us to drool at its size as it swam circles around the bait, even nudging it at one point, but lockjaw had set in and there was nothing we could do to get that fish to eat.

Earlier that day and on the previous day, every one of the 22 cobia we spotted hungrily attacked our offerings. Live bait or lures—it didn’t matter. But this biggest of the lot just wouldn’t eat. We conjured and reckoned and guessed what role the manatee was playing in this mystery, but will always have to wonder at the answer. Why did the cobia on the manatee turn down an easy meal but his brethren on the rays gobble every bait?