Skipjack Trevally (Skippy)
Jetty / HarbourFast-moving schooling fish found around jetty pylons and rocky structure. Takes small lures and bait readily. Often caught alongside herring but puts up a better fight for its size.
Overview
Skipjack trevally — or 'skippies' — are one of Perth's most fun light-tackle species. They school around jetty pylons, rock walls, and harbour structure year-round, hitting lures and bait with enthusiasm. Pound for pound, they fight harder than herring and make a decent meal.
Identification
Skippy, silver trevally, white trevally, sand trevally
A deep, laterally compressed silver fish with a yellow-green wash over the back, a small dark blotch on the gill cover, yellow tinges in the fins, and the hard bony scutes along the rear of the lateral line that mark every trevally. Small skippies get confused with herring on a jetty, but a skippy is deeper-bodied, blunter in the face, and those scutes are unmistakable once you've run a thumb along them. Bigger fish are sold and talked about as silver or white trevally — same species. The tropical golden and giant trevally don't turn up in Perth.
How to Catch
Small prawn pieces, mulie strips, whitebait
Small metal lures, bait jigs, micro jigs, small soft plastics
Light float rig with a size 4–6 hook, or a small running sinker rig fished near pylons. Keep terminal tackle light — skippies can be line-shy.
Fish tight to jetty pylons and rocky structure using light tackle. Cast small metals or soft plastics and retrieve with a slow twitch along the pylons. On bait, a float rig drifted past structure is deadly. Berley will draw the school in and keep them feeding.
Active throughout the day, especially around tide changes. Morning and afternoon sessions tend to be more productive. They bite year-round but are more concentrated around structure in the cooler months.
Up to 3kg, commonly 400–800g
Year-round
Size & Growth
The typical jetty skippy is 25–35 cm and 400–800 g. A good one is over 40 cm and pushes 1.5 kg, and anything near the 3 kg headline size is a serious light-tackle fish that will make a mess of 4 lb line. They're slow-growing and long-lived — well over a decade — so a big skippy is an old fish and worth a thought before it goes in the bucket. Land-based fish from metro jetties are almost always school size; the bigger ones sit deeper around offshore reef and structure.
Diet & Habitat
Skippies eat small crustaceans, worms, prawns, molluscs and baitfish, picking at the bottom as often as chasing bait in the water column. They school around anything hard — jetty pylons, rock walls, groynes, harbour walls, reef edges and weed lines — usually in 2–15 m, and hold tight to structure in current. In WA they're a temperate species found from about the Gascoyne down the west coast and along the south coast, with Cockburn Sound, Fremantle harbour and the metro jetties holding fish year-round. They come up in a berley trail readily, which is why one good burley pot can hold a school all session.
WA Size & Bag Limits
| Minimum size | 25 cm |
|---|---|
| Bag limit | 8 |
| Counts toward | Counts within the statewide nearshore/estuarine finfish mixed daily limit of 16. |
Bag limit: 8, counting within the statewide nearshore and estuarine finfish mixed-species daily limit of 16. Minimum size: 250mm.
Eating Quality
Decent eating — white, firm flesh with a slightly stronger flavour than whiting, and a dark bloodline down the fillet worth trimming out. Bleed and ice them immediately; like most trevally the flesh goes soft and metallic if the fish sits warm on a jetty. Smaller fish are often better on the plate — a 30 cm skippy is sweet and clean, while big old ones get coarse and can be strong. Crumb or batter the fillets and fry, or grill them skin-on; the flesh is firm enough to hold together in a curry or a chowder. A well-bled bigger fish is good raw as sashimi on the day. They freeze better than herring or tailor, though the texture firms up, so use frozen fillets for crumbing rather than pan-frying.
Perth Tips
Ammo Jetty, Woodman Point Jetty, and the North Mole are reliable skippy spots. Use light line (4–6lb) for more bites and more fun. Skippies also make excellent live bait for bigger species like mulloway and kingfish.