A young angler just landed a PR carp that will be hard to top. Callum Pettit, an 11-year-old from Kent, a county in southeast England, caught the behemoth carp while fishing with his dad, Stuart Pettit, 40, at a private lake near Reims, France. Pettit was using a carp bait that was banoffee-flavored—a popular British dessert pie. The big stone carp took him 20 minutes to bring to shore. When he finally subdued the fish, Pettit and his father knew they had a trophy carp and estimated it was 70 or 80 pounds. But when they weighed the big fish, it came in at a whopping 96 pounds, 10 ounces, easily setting a new personal record for Pettit and almost doubling the personal record of his father. In fact, the carp was only a couple of pounds lighter than Pettit, himself.
“It is a once in a lifetime fish, and Callum has caught it at 11. Where does he go from here?” Stuart told Metro UK. “He would have more of a chance of winning the lottery than catching a bigger carp than that.”
The final moments of the fight and the ensuing weigh-in were captured on a GoPro. The video footage was posted to YouTube. The young angler’s excitement is palpable after his father nets the catch. “Come on!” he shouts, holding his arm, which is sore from reeling in the fish. “That’s massive, Dad…That is one powerful fish. I’m shaking, Dad.”
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The owners of the lake say the massive carp is nicknamed “Big Girl.” Carp fishing in Europe is more popular than in the United States, though its popularity has been rising in recent years among a small sub-set of American anglers. Pettit’s fish goes down as one of the biggest carp ever landed by a British angler. According to Metro UK, the largest carp ever landed by a British angler was a 105-pound, 14-ounce mirror carp caught by Ian Burton in 2019. Carp anglers in Europe typically practice catch-and-release, as Pettit and his father did. After posing for some hero shots with the behemoth fish, they released it back into the lake.
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