A British schoolboy has broken the world record for catching the largest carp ever for a young student.

Callum Pettit, 11, caught a carp weighing 96lb 10oz – just 4lb lighter than he was – during a fishing trip to Reims, France with his father.

The record is even more impressive when the adult record is being considered – only slightly larger at 101lbs 6oz.

Callum’s seventh fish was almost twice the size of the best fish his father Stuart had caught in 30 years of fishing.

Callum’s seventh fish was almost twice the size of the best fish his father Stuart had caught in 30 years of fishing.

It took Callum 20 minutes to pull her out and because the water was quite murky, neither he nor his dad realized how big it was at first.

The fish, nicknamed Big Girl, used Callum’s special banoffee-flavored bait.

Only when Stuart, 40, went to scoop the fish into a net on the river bank, did he suddenly realize that it was one of the largest carp in Europe.

Other anglers gathered around to watch the important landing.

Video captured with Stuart’s GoPro camera shows the moment Callum first saw it. The camera recorded the boy repeatedly saying ‘it’s too big, dad’.

Stuart, from Ashford, Kent, said: ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime fish and Callum caught it when he was just 11 years old. Where will he go from here?

‘He would have a better chance of winning the lottery than of catching a carp larger than that.’

Callum said: “I couldn’t believe how big it was and my arm was really sore afterwards.”

The boy started fishing with his father as a child and his previous largest catch was a 29-pound mirror carp.

They had booked a fishing trip to France in 2020 but the Covid pandemic postponed the trip until earlier this month.

Father and son were in their two-storey tent when Callum’s alarm went off at 6am to signal that he had been bitten.

“With the bigger fish, they don’t float around the lake, they’re like a load,” said Stuart, a regional sales manager for a playground company. All Callum could do was hold on.

“He played with the fish for about 20 minutes, slowly pulling it up and reeling it towards him.

‘We didn’t know its size until we put it in the net and even then we thought it might be a 60 or 70 pound fish.

‘The owner of the fishing ground came out and identified it as Big Girl.

‘That was the biggest fish I’ve ever seen.

‘It took two of us to lift it onto the scale. We then weighed Callum and he weighed just over 4lbs.

‘I don’t think it has really sunk in and he still doesn’t understand the importance of what he has achieved.’

The world record for a carp stands at 112 lbs 14oz for a mirror carp caught by Dutchman Michel Schoenmakers at a fishery in Hungary in 2018.

And the biggest carp ever caught by a British angler was Ian Burton’s 105lb 14oz example at the same lake in 2019.