watch-11-year-old-boy-lands-massive-96-pound-carp

WATCH: 11-Year Old Boy Lands Massive 96-Pound Carp

A young British boy made a memory that will last a lifetime when he reeled in a massive carp weighing nearly one hundred pounds. Callum Pettit, an 11-year-old from Kent, of southeast England, caught the carp fishing at a private lake in France with his father, Stuart, proudly looking on.

Using a dessert-flavored bait, young Callum netted the stone carp, nicknamed “Big Girl” by locals, after a 20 minute fight. The father-son pair knew the prize fish would weigh in up around “70 or 80 pounds” but couldn’t believe their eyes when it nearly hit triple digits on the scale. According to father Stuart, the fish nearly doubled his own personal lifetime record. Funny enough, the massive carp nearly weighed as much as the boy, himself, who caught it, Field and Stream writes.

“It is a once in a lifetime fish, and Callum has caught it at 11. Where does he go from here?” Stuart said. “He would have more of a chance of winning the lottery than catching a bigger carp than that.”

Callum said his arms ached after wrangling the prized catch.

“I couldn’t believe how big it was and my arms were really aching afterwards,” Callum said.

The boy’s massive carp is only 16 pounds lighter than the world record for any age group

Onlookers captured the latter stages of the fight, the weigh-in, and the celebration afterwards on a GoPro camera for a YouTube video. The best part of the video is watching Callum grow more and more excited 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.”

Stuart said that Callum’s biggest fish prior to “Big Girl” was a mirror carp which weighed in at just one-third of the size of his new record. Officials believe that Callum also set the record for largest carp ever caught by a junior angler in world history.

“With bigger fish they don’t charge off around the lake, they are like a dead weight,” Stuart said. “All Callum could do was hold on. He played the fish for about 20 minutes, slowly pulling it up and winding it towards him. We didn’t have any idea of the size of it until we got it into the net and even then we thought it could have been a 60 pound or 70 pound fish.

“The owner of the fishery came out and identified it as the ‘Big Girl’. It was the biggest fish I have ever set eyes on.”

The world record for any carp currently stands at 112 pounds, 14 ounces, for a mirror carp caught at a fishery in Hungary by Dutchman Michel Schoenmakers in 2018.