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After planning a fishing trip for months with one of his close friends, a man named Lloyd Watson from Manchester headed to Chew Valley Lake near Bristol and landed what is a pending British fishing record for northern pike.
The existing British record for northern pike is a 46 pound, 13 ounce fish caught in 1992 by R. Lewis while fishing in Llandegfedd, Wales. That’s a 32-year-old fishing record and on that many started to speculate on whether or not it would ever be broken. Lloyd Watson’s new British pike record is a 47 pound, 5 oz northern pike.
Alas, Lloyd Watson was fishing on Chew Valley Lake the day before Valentine’s Day when he hooked a massive northern pike using smelt as bait. Prior to the trip Watson and his buddy did exhaustive research into the Lake and how they could pull in a massive northern pike with their eyes set on the British pike record. Even if they never really thought they’d catch the record, catching a monster was always the plan.
He’s been fishing for pike for 30 years but Lloyd Watson has never caught a fish like this and the response has been incredible. He told Yahoo! Sports “I still can’t get over what’s actually happened. I’ve got people from all over the world messaging me, wanting interviews. I feel like this can’t happen to me. I’m going to wake up.”
Funnily enough, when he hooked the record-setting fish he believed it to be a small pike that was “weeded up.” He added “It was only when it got close in that it suddenly woke up and started taking line – and I started to think ‘hang on a minute!’ When I got it into the net, we both looked at it and couldn’t believe the size. It was absolutely ridiculous. This is the best day of my life.”
Chew Valley Lake near Bristol sits inside the Mendip Hills National Landscape (protected forest) and is a pike fishing hotspot in Southern England. According to many of the various reports on this British pike record, there had been multiple 40+ pound northern pikes caught there in recent months so the lake was chosen as it was primed to serve up a massive fish.
The IGFA fishing world record for northern pike is a 55 pound, 1 oz fish caught on the Lake of Grefeern in Germany all the way back in 1986.
So while this is roughly 8 pounds off the fishing world record for northern pike it does stand to be a new British fishing record once it is approved by the British Record Fish Committee and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be accepted as a new record, it’s now just a matter of going through the formalities.