DISCLAIMER: This pike was caught before the 15th March 2025.
Pictures have just come to light of one of the biggest pike ever to be caught from a British river.
Weighing a mighty 41lb 2oz, the fish was banked by John Anderson just before the end of the 2024/2025 season from a private stretch of a Midlands river. The Angling Trust Voluntary Bailiff, who is also a qualified angling coach, is no stranger to big river pike, having caught them to 36lb in the past. However, he said that his latest river monster was without question the ‘fattest and strongest’ pike he’d ever handled.
“The whole experience felt more like she’d caught me than the other way round!” laughed the 64-year-old."
“She dictated the whole fight. If she wanted to run, there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop her and even once on the bank it was a case of me only being able to lift her up when she’d let me. I’ve caught a lot of pike over the years, but this was in a different league to anything else."
“I was fishing on my own and due to the power of the fish, getting self-takes was out of the question. I had to improvise, so I just hit record on my phone so that I could take some stills from the video footage,” said John.
“I’d fished this particular spot towards the end of the previous season and hooked and lost a really good fish on two occasions. I’d been doing a lot of coaching this season but wanted to do a bit of my own fishing too, so decided to head back to see if I could catch what I called ‘The Beast’.”
The all-important bite came just 20 minutes after John had cast out a floatfished sardine to spot in 4ft of water.
“In 2019 I set myself the target of catching a 20lb pike from this river. I had one of 21lb quite quickly and then one of 26lb in March. The next season, I made it my goal to catch a river thirty and managed two."
“Last season I had a 36-pounder and thought it couldn’t possibly get any better than that. After returning this fish, though, I just sat there trembling!”
The biggest pike to be reported from a UK river is John Goble’s 45lb 8oz specimen caught from the Norfolk Broads in 2009, while Neville Fickling previously held the British record for the species with a 41lb 6oz fish from Norfolk’s River Thurne, landed in 1985.
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