Teenage angler Jed Fois was delighted to catch this large pike in a Huddersfield canal.

But he is also concerned at illegal actions by others, who are stripping local waterways of fish.

Jed, 14, who has been fishing since the age of three, said people were draining locks on the canals and taking away large numbers of fish to eat.

It is is illegal for anglers to keep all the fish they catch.

There are strict limits on the type and size of fish which can be kept and the Environment Agency takes court action if people are caught breaching the rules.

Pike up to 65cm can be kept but Jed put back in the water the one he caught.

“I love angling and have been doing it since I was three. My dad Dan got me into it; his is half-Italian and was brought up in a fishing community in Italy.

“I caught the pike, which was about 7lbs, on the Huddersfield Broad Canal near Cooper Bridge. It was caught on a lure and I was delighted, but I have caught some even bigger than that.

“A lot of people are concerned at fish stocks in the waterways and I don’t like to see what some people do.

“They drain the locks to empty them of fish to take away for food and quite often, we have turned up to find the lock pound drained.

Huddersfield Broad Canal

“It means a lot of the fish have been taken illegally”

Jed, of Honley High School, lives in Crosland Moor and fishes a number of local waters.

But he is already looking forward to a bigger challenge: fishing for bass in the lakes across Florida next year.

The Angling Trust said that in recent years, illegal fishing has increased dramatically in a number of areas of the country and many thousands of fish being killed in fisheries by anglers with no permission to fish there.

Migrant workers, who come from cultures where coarse fish are regularly taken to eat, have taken huge quantities of fish (many of them large specimens) both legally and illegally in recent years.