Roach just 4oz off the record caught by mistake...

A roach weighing 2lb is the stuff of dreams for every angler, while a 3lb fish seems effectively beyond our reach – except, perhaps, in our wildest fantasies.

But a 4lb roach? Well, that’s nothing short of ridiculous!  But Norfolk-based specimen hunter Phil Spinks recently discovered that these incredibly rare fish do exist, when he slipped the net under a specimen weighing exactly 4lb on a recent trip to Homersfield Lake  in Suffolk – a venue made famous by the late angling legend John Wilson.

The fish is just 4oz shy of Keith Berry’s 4lb 4oz British record, caught in Northern Ireland back in 2006.

“I feel privileged to have seen such an enormous roach on the bank,” Phil tells Angling Times,

“and to be honest it was a very lucky capture.

“In early spring I use small, high-attract 10mm pop-ups for carp, and it was one of these that caught this colossal roach.

“It’s not unusual to pick up good-sized roach by accident on these tactics, and usually I put them straight back without weighing or photographing them, but this fish was clearly very big.”

The reason Phil usually puts these big roach back is that they’re not caught by design, and so to a hardened specimen hunter like Phil they don’t strictly count. That’s why he was initially reluctant to publicise the specimen.

“I’ve got mixed feelings about the merit of the capture,” he admits. 

“I’ve been fortunate enough to land more than forty 3lb roach by design, so I know just how rare a four-pounder is, even if it was caught on a carp rod!”