An 11-year-old British student broke the world record for the largest carp ever caught by a junior fisherman. Callum Petit caught a common carp that weighed about 40 kilograms – just 1.81 kilograms lighter than him – during a fishing trip with his father in Reims, France.
Even more impressive is the record broken by the boy when you consider the record for adults, which is 45.98 kg.
This is Callum’s seventh fish since he began getting into the activity with his 40-year-old father, Stuart. Only this time, the carp is almost twice the size of his father’s best personal catch in 30 years of fishing. It took the boy 20 minutes to get it out, and since the water was quite dirty, neither he nor his father realized at first how big it was.
The fish, nicknamed the Big Girl, was caught in a net, lured by a special bait used by Callum, an English pie made of bananas, cream and a thick caramel sauce, flavored with bananas.
The father and son had scheduled a fishing trip to France in 2020, but the Covid pandemic postponed it to early May.
They were sleeping in a tent when the motion sensor in the boy’s hammock went off at 6 a.m. to signal that he had caught a fish.
Stuart told the British news website Daily Mail that he only noticed the size of the fish when he approached the net on the banks of the river. Other fishermen gathered to see this great feat of the boy.
A video captured with Stuart’s GoPro camera shows the moment the boy first saw her. You can hear him repeatedly saying, “It’s huge, Dad, it’s huge.” The student’s father needed the help of another fisherman to get the fish out of the water.
His father said, “It’s a once in a lifetime fish and Callum caught him when he was 11. I wonder where he’s going from here.” “He’ll have a better chance of winning the lottery than catching a carp of that size.”
“I couldn’t believe how big it was and afterwards it hurt so much in my arms,” said the boy, who started fishing with his father from a very young age. He said his previous biggest catch was a mirror carp that weighed 30 pounds.
