Most American anglers will never see a carp big enough to break their net. Scott Lennox just landed one that may be the biggest ever deliberately caught in the country.
On 23 December 2025, the 35-year-old — a former international rugby player who moved to California's Bay Area from England — banked a common carp weighing 64.22 pounds, later confirmed on an IGFA-certified scale. MeatEater, which detailed the catch this week, said it topped the previously accepted U.S. record by more than two pounds. Angling Times in the UK logged it at 64 pounds 2 ounces and admitted nobody is entirely sure where the bar sits: "Although the country's official carp record is hard to track down, it's believed to be around the 67lb mark."
US carp records are famously messy. Plenty of states track none at all, and others count bow and spear catches alongside rod-and-reel fish. MeatEater reckons fewer than 20 anglers have ever landed a 50-pound carp on American soil, which is why a documented fish in the mid-60s turns heads.
Lennox grew up carp fishing in Shropshire but had drifted from the sport until a chance meeting reignited it. "Meeting Nico turned out to be one of the luckiest fishing encounters of my life," he said. "After we got talking, he shared the location of a nearby city lake where he'd caught carp up to 20 pounds. On just my second trip there, I was fortunate enough to land a 20-pounder myself."
He spent more than a year learning the bigger lake that eventually gave up the record. "In the winter of 2024, things really started to come together," he said. "There were rumors of occasional really big fish coming out of it, like an upper 40 or 50. It's a very fertile water, with lots of invertebrates, snails, crawfish, and forage fish." Reaching his spot meant a 90-minute hike and nights spent beside the rods in a cheap camping chair.
Trophy carp anglers go to extraordinary lengths — and occasionally for extraordinary money. The American Carp Society once offered $250,000, underwritten by Lloyd's of London, to anyone who broke the Texas state record during a tournament on Austin's Lady Bird Lake. Al St. Cyr managed it with a fish over 43 pounds and walked away with the full prize.
The world's biggest carp dwarf even Lennox's fish. Wired2Fish reports the IGFA all-tackle world record common carp at 75 pounds 11 ounces, caught at Lac de Cassien in France on prepared bait and eight-pound line. The discipline is better organised in the States than outsiders assume: the Carp Anglers Group dates to 1993 and the American Carp Society to 2002, with tournaments like New York's Wild Carp Classic and Colorado's fly-only Carp Slam now firmly established.
State records, meanwhile, keep falling. On The Water noted that Connecticut's Lake Lillinonah yielded a 45.5-pound record, just ahead of a 45-pound, 5-ounce fish caught there a year before; New York stands at 50 pounds 6 ounces and Maryland at 49.
As for Lennox, he took the milestone in stride — fishing out the remainder of his four-day birthday trip like a man who already had what he came for.
