Surprising catch from the river

A fairly routine session fishing for chub in the River Stour led to a once in a blue moon catch for father and son Stephen and William Henderson from Canterbury. The pair could hardly believe their eyes when their sweetcorn bait was taken by a perfectly conditioned 20lb carp just before 10pm at Kingsmead last Wednesday. Dad Stephen hooked the carp and then handed over the rod over to his 14-year-old son, who spent 25 minutes bringing the fish in. Pleasure angler Henderson, 48, has been fishing the Stour since the age of seven and says he’d never seen a carp there, let alone caught one. He said: “It was a real surprise and William just kept saying ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.’ “We’d been catching chub during the day although I had seen this huge fish which I thought at the time was a sea trout. “We decided to come back later and it was just getting dark when I hooked into the carp. At first we didn’t know what it was and then it bellied up and we could see it was a bit of a monster.” Mr Henderson said the fact the fish was in such good condition suggested it had not been caught before but it was by no means his biggest carp catch ever. A frequent visitor to France he once caught a 69lb carp while William, a pupil at Canterbury’s Chaucer Technology School, caught a 29-pounder at Chilham Mill four years before.

Paul Mercer, of the Canterbury and District Angling Association, said it was likely the carp had probably ‘escaped’ when the river had been in flood and joined up with the association’s complex of lakes at Fordwich.