Queenfish in WA: Where, When and How to Catch Them

Queenfish (Scomberoides commersonnianus) are long, thin and flattened side-on, like a silver ribbon with a row of grey-green blotches down the flank. They have a small, forward-set mouth and a soft jaw that tears easily — crush your barbs, because you’ll be unhooking a lot of them. They grow to around 12kg but most fish you’ll land are 2–5kg, and a metre-long queenie is a genuinely good one.

The fish they get confused with is trevally, and the two often bust the same bait school. The tell is body shape: queenfish are skinny and ribbon-like, giant trevally and the smaller trevally species are deep-bodied and round. If it’s flat as a board with spots down the side, it’s a queenie. If it feels like it’s trying to pull your arm off and looks like a dinner plate, that’s trevally.

Queenfish are a tropical inshore fish, found from roughly the Gascoyne north — Exmouth, the Pilbara and into the Kimberley — across sand flats, reef edges, harbour entrances and creek mouths. They herd baitfish into the shallows and feed at the surface, which is exactly why they’re such a gift to a lure angler: you can often see them coming.

They bite year-round in the north, but the cooler dry season, roughly April to October, is the most fishable window. As the water warms toward summer the queenies share the flats with longtail tuna, bonito and mackerel, and the Exmouth land-based scene fires on the rising tide toward November, when bigger fish push close to shore. Tides matter more than the calendar: a run-in flooding the flats, or the first of the run-out draining a creek mouth, is when they switch on.

Queenfish sit inside the nearshore/estuarine finfish group in WA, and the rules are not what you might remember. Under the current DPIRD recreational fishing guide:

• The trevally and queenfish group carries a daily bag limit of 8 per species.
• That sits within a total mixed-species nearshore/estuarine bag limit of 16 fish per fisher, statewide.
• There is no minimum legal size for queenfish itself.

Rules change, and they change without warning, so don’t take a forum post — or this article — as gospel. Pull up the current DPIRD rules before you fill an esky. Given the eating quality, most anglers never trouble the bag limit anyway.

These run roughly north to south. All of them hold queenfish through the warmer half of the year; the flats and creek systems around Exmouth Gulf are the heartland.

Queenfish are not a heavy-tackle fish, but their soft mouths and acrobatics mean you need to match the gear to the job.

• Rod: 7–8ft medium spin rod rated 4–8kg or PE2–4 — enough to throw poppers all day without wearing your shoulder out.
• Reel: 3000–5000 size spin reel with a smooth drag. Queenfish run hard but short.
• Line: 20–30lb braid to a 30–40lb fluorocarbon or heavy mono leader. A short heavy-mono bite trace handles their raspy mouth; you don’t need wire unless mackerel are mixed in.
• Poppers and stickbaits: Halco Roosta poppers, Nomad Madscad, Duel Adagio and similar 90–130mm surface walkers and poppers are the bread and butter. Chrome slugs (30–60g) cover distance when fish are out wide.
• Soft plastics: paddle-tails on a 1/4–3/8oz jighead when the fish are sitting deeper than the surface bite suggests.

Single inline hooks with crushed barbs make releasing fish faster and do less damage — sensible when nearly everything goes back.

The classic queenfish session is sight-casting. Spot a school herding bait or busting the surface, cast past them, and bring the lure back through the action. Walk-the-dog stickbaits and chugged poppers both work — vary the retrieve speed until they commit. Queenfish are notorious followers: they’ll chase to your feet, swipe and miss several times, then eat on the last metre. Keep the lure moving right to the rod tip and don’t slow down when you see the fish.

When they’re not showing on top, work soft plastics through the water column around the same structure — creek mouths, drop-offs, reef edges. And mind the sharp scutes near the tail when you grab one to unhook it.