World Record-shaking common carp weighs in at a staggering 88lb - the second biggest ever landed!

The second biggest common carp ever caught has been landed at a weight of 88lb.

Taking an amazing 2hours to bring to the net, the mighty fish was caught by Korda’s Damian Clarke while fishing La Saussaie in the Champagne region of France.

The huge specimen is just 7oz shy of the current world record common carp caught by German Angler, Markus Pelzer from a private lake last year.

During his incredible, week-long trip to the 10.5 acre water, Damian - Operations Director for Korda - also landed a brace of 50s and a mid 40, but it wasn’t until the 39-year-old made a change of tactics that the fish started coming.

“Two nights into the trip and I hadn’t had a fish, so a decided I needed to change my approach,” said the Colchester-based rod. “I was fishing peg 3 which gave me plenty of features to go at, but a warm wind was pushing down the lake and after taking a look at a bay down the far end of the water I found a good group of fish.

“I set about stalking them, but after a while it was pretty obvious they were fairly rig shy and I needed to scale things down a bit.”

Tying up new rigs, Damian felt something more ‘subtle’ would give him a better chance, with his new set up consisting of a size 8 Kurv Shanks hook, a 15lb N-Trap hooklink and a running lead clip using a 2.5oz flat swivel pear lead.

“I thought that the running rigs would provide something a little different. Pressured carp will often find semi-fixed leads easy to deal with as they use the weight of the lead to sling the rig. However, a running lead would act completely differently,” explained Damian.

Fishing a snowman setup on the hook consisting of a Mainline Activ-8 20mm bottom bait coupled with a 15mm corkball pop-up, Damian recast to set his trap, adding a kilo of Activ-8 free offerings tight around his hookbait.

It worked perfectly, producing no less than three fish the first night – a 50, a 44lb fish and another at 31lb. Then came something very special.

“I was talking with a friend about how crazy it would be to catch the big common for the lake when my middle rod went with a slow take. When I hooked into it I could feel it was a very powerful fish,” said Damian.

“The battle lasted an incredible two hours. Most of it was on the surface and it spent the majority of its time holding its position in the middle of the lake. This was at a range of over 150 yards. It was then that I had a real feeling it was something special.


“After some nervous moments I eventually had her in netting range and the colossal common was in the folds of my net – all 88lb of her.

“I targeted this incredible fish after seeing a picture of my good friend Clive Gibbins with her last year. She was simply colossal and most probably completely unique in the carp world. To have caught her is a privilege that simply blew me away,” he added.


The tackle that tamed an 80
Damian tamed his massive fish using 12ft, 3.5lb tc Daiwa Infinity rods, coupled with Daiwa ISO reels and 12lb Korda Kontour line.


The World Record
The biggest common carp ever landed was caught in October last year by German Angler Markus Pelzer.

Weighing 88lb 7oz, the fish, known as Mary, beat the previous best weight of 88lb 2oz held by a fish from Les Teillatts, France called ‘The Generals Mate’ caught by British Angler Roger Hanley in June last year.

Video footage of the incredible capture will be coming to the Korda website very soon, click here to visit the site.