Oh Valerie!

13 February, 2026 | Carp | Angler Blogs | Articles | Catches

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A fish-filled couple of trips for Andy Bradnock culminate in something quite spectacular during this recount of his fishing at Frimley and beyond!

After my last session at Frimley I had to curtail my carping obsession as my wife’s car broke down on her way home from work one evening. Luckily my neighbour and all-round decent bloke drove me out to pick her up and tow the car back home.

The water-pump had seized snapping all the associated belts and then unceremoniously dumped all its fluids in a small village 10-miles from home.

The weekend was spent up-to my elbows in oil and grease replacing the water-pump. Sadly it wasn’t remotely simple as two of the bolts holding the pump in place had sheared.

I luckily managed to extract one but the other needed a specialist to come round and drill it out for me. Eventually the car was all back together again, just in time for me to go back to work.

The following weekend I headed back to the Peacock Lake. I dropped into the last swim in the South-West corner, the longest push from the car-park. As I rounded the narrowest bend on the path disaster struck and after a comical few wobbles and stumbles I fell, tipping the barrow over with a dramatic flurry.

I didn’t think I had done any damage and it isn’t the first time I have had a barrow go over on me however, when I unpacked my rod-bag I found I had snapped off one of my reel handles.

The swim has a small island directly in front of it and a quiet margin down to the right.  As way of welcome, as I arrived in the swim a patch of water to the left of the island had a couple of billowing brown silt clouds erupting through the water column.

Straight away I positioned a rod as close to this activity as I thought I could get away with, then sorted out the margin rod.

The middle-rod was placed in an area I have seen fish bubble on previous trips. This was heavily baited with a jar of Krill Frenzied Pulses and particles, 3kg of Betaine Green swim stim pellets, krill liquid, crab extract, fish-gutz and a good helping of garlic and krill oils.

The owner feeds a garlic infused pellet when the lake is closed so the fish should be tuned into smelling it.

This was all mixed with the Swim Stim Margin Mix ground-bait and Big Fish Mega Margin-mix ground-bait, squeezed into balls and catapulted over the middle-rod.

I didn’t have to wait a huge amount of time before I was called into action, the left-hand rod cast to the silt clouds was away just before 17.00. At 22lb 10oz the common was a very welcome start.

The bite had resulted in a mass exodus from the area so, I took this opportunity to hurl a few balls of ground-bait into the area before I re-cast the rod.

Just over an hour had passed since putting the first fish back when the middle rod fished over a bucket of bait roared into life. The high speed fight was what I had begun to expect from these fish and, it was a good thirty minutes before I managed to coax the beast into the waiting net.

My eyes were a bit over-enthusiastic as I initially thought I had bagged a 30, the 26lb 15oz fish was pristine but slightly smaller than I thought.

I was very encouraged that this fish had come off a big pile of bait so quickly in the session, I therefore re-wrapped the rod slung it back into position and threw another 10 balls of ground-bait around the area. The action continued as darkness fell, a lake bred 3lber followed by a mid-twenty mirror kept me busy through the early part of the night.

The main event occurred after mid-night when the left rod bounced in the rests signalling another fish had made a mistake. After a thank-fully less dramatic battle a super long muscular common that stretched the scales down to 32lbs 9oz was netted.

Sessions like this don’t happen to me very often and I find them very hard to write about as it feels like a list, with me, trying to tell you, how clever I am.

In reality at certain times this lake can be very productive, the trick is to make hay when the opportunity presents itself. By the time the sun was peeping over the tree line I was just about pickled, fortunately the day was quiet so I got my head down for a few hours and felt human again by the time I was eating lunch.

The Doc had come down for a short day trip fishing down to my left and managed a couple of bites. He was just contemplating packing up and making his way home for dinner when I had two bites in quick succession.

A beautiful 28lb mirror and a 20lb common. As darkness descended over the lake I was sat reading – listening to heavy, echoing wallows as fish moved in front of me.

What happened for the remainder of the night I am truly unsure of. The runs started at around midnight and continued all through the dark hours. I seemed to be casting baiting and playing fish continually through the night, I am unsure of how many I actually caught as a few were double takes, so I was slipping some fish back as soon as I had un-hooked them.

For some reason the fish were all acting erratically bouncing around so much on the mat it was difficult to just un-hook them, often requiring me to pin them down to get the barbless hook out.

I definitely caught one more 30, a common of 31lb 4oz that behaved, I am fairly sure another two were over the magical mark but were being so crazy I was worried that I would end up injuring them so put them back without even weighing them.

I have never known fish to behave like this, especially big fish, it was like it was the first time they had ever been caught and it completely freaked them out. By the morning I was utterly frazzled but as the sun illuminated the lake the takes stopped and calm returned.

I had used far more bait than I had anticipated and needed to knock up another bucket in the night, a few more sessions like this and I will be bankrupt. I slept for a couple of hours and felt just about human again then slowly packed down from one of the busiest sessions I can remember.

My next trip out saw me heading west to Frimley for my usual allocation of 48hrs of angling indulgence.

This trip unfortunately fell on a full moon so inevitably all the morons that think this is significant rocked up, filling every nook and cranny with a bivvy and a battery of rods.

With the lake being so busy I had to slot in where I could, the only swim I even half fancied that was free, was The Lawns, so I dropped in there.

The nights had started to get colder so I had plenty of bait with me, expecting big beds of bait to be productive. The lawns the way I fish it doesn’t really lend itself to this style of fishing. In this swim each bait is placed by hand a small amount of bait dropped over each rig.

In this situation I try to pack in as much liquid attractor as possible to give off as much food signal off as little nutritional material as possible. The krill liquid and crab extract do this perfectly using it to make the Swim Stim Margin Mix ground-bait sloppy.

As I am dropping this by hand it just needs to hold together long enough to get the liquids onto the bottom which then leach through the water column. The weather conditions were rubbish with high pressure and sun but the tree-line I was fishing up to has done bites for me in such conditions in the past.

The first night was quiet but the middle rod had pulled up through the night. It did this so slowly that not a beep had been emitted from the alarm. I assumed that under-tow was responsible so I loosened off the bobbin which settled back in its starting position.

Over the next couple of hours this rod imperceptibly tightened up again so I decided something was amiss and I needed to re-do the rod.

I started to reel in but the bait wasn’t where I had placed it, it was stuck in a little patch of lilies a few yards to the right. I slowly extricated to culprit then unceremoniously reeled in a double figure bream.

Despite almost every swim on the lake being taken the only bite of the two day session was from Jerry’s Fully, a magnificent 42lb creature and sadly not to me.

So, one angler could boast of a successful full-moon session while everyone else would keep quiet about another full-moon blank.

As I was packing up the sun was still beating down into the sun-trap that is The Lawns the air above my bivvy thick with midges that circled and spiralled in shafts of sunlight, looking like clouds of delicate smoke.

My next trip down the following week was thankfully much quieter, the air pressure was still high at 1016mb but my path had been crossed by a pair of magpies on my way to the lake. I was later than usual as the traffic was hideous so missed the 14.00 crossing slot and had to wait for an hour, until I could call up the Crossing- Overlords and beg for permission to cross.

The nights had been really cold for the last few days, down to 2-3 degrees with the first frosts of the year, and cloudless bright blue days. Eventually I was over the crossing, through the gates and locked away from reality for a couple of days.

My trip around the lake proved fruitless until I reached the top-end. Fish were present in the occupied Pads and the vacant Henry’s. The guy fishing the pads had just dropped in there speculatively after seeing some bubbling after packing up from further down the lake on his way home.

I was soon high-tailing it back to the car, the kit hurriedly thrown onto the barrow as yet again I did the longest push on the complex up to Henry’s. I got all set up but waited until the angler in the pads had packed up and left before getting baits into position as I thought I would probably ruin his chances if I had tried.

As soon as his last rod was in the holdall I was casting baits to my favoured spots in this magnificent swim. I heard fish crashing around in the general area through the night and a few liners on the left and middle rods had me on tenterhooks but, by morning, nothing had happened.

Mid-morning the middle rod lurched the tip bending down to the heavy captive back lead, I was just about to pick the rod up as the tip went back to normal and the bobbin dropped back to its previous position. Nothing happened through the rest of bite time until to the back-drop of a screaming delkim the right treeline rod bent down the bobbin hitting the blank.

As this is a high stakes spot, I was rod in hand pulling into what I had thought was a bite. Sadly I think it was just another liner maybe a fish trailing, as there was nothing there.

I decided to stay put for the 2^nd night re-doing the right and middle rods, the left rod was left to keep disturbance to a minimum. This left area was where I had seen the most activity the day before, when I brought this rod in while packing away the next day the hook-link was tangled around the leader. This could have happened while reeling in but I could well have had an ineffective rig sitting amongst a pod of fish that first night.

Not a single beep emanated from the alarms for the rest of the session so, I decided I would aim for the 14.00 crossing and started a slow pack down. The bivvy was away and at just before 13.00 as I was dismantling my marker rod, the treeline rod lurched in the rests, the tip smacked down and the alarm went into meltdown.

With all the panache and grace of an over-weight arthritic elephant, I chucked everything in my hands all over the place and dived for the protesting rod. The heavy captive back-lead performs a really useful function when fishing in this manner because it holds the line down, keeping it low in the water out of the woodwork.

I was soon grunting and groaning keeping the tip down low, pulling the fish away from the snags and as it kited out into the lake it came to a halt behind a couple of lily stems.

This late in the year they don’t have the resistance and toughness of the summer, so with a squeaking rubbing sensation coming through the taut nylon, the leaves were unceremoniously decapitated. This momentary stalemate gave me chance to clamber into chesties and jump into the margin.

The slight change of angle saw the fish extricated from the pads and swing out into more open water. This end of the lake is full of patches of lilies so you have to generally play fish fairly heavily with robust gear, the fights are often explosive sweary type affairs. The fish initially felt heavy and slow, ponderous almost and the familiar fight anxiety began to bubble up in my chest.

The fight then suddenly changed character completely, the fish becoming an erratic double as it zipped and turned at high speed all around the swim, the line constantly pinging off its fins. It still wouldn’t come up in the water despite me being quite heavy handed with it. It then started to feel really weighty again, the tail patterns seemingly a long way from where the line entered the water.

The fight continued along this line, one minute feeling huge the next like a bionic double, still it refused to come up in the water. I was about 15 minutes in by this stage, the glut of acorns we have seen this year provided a surreal backing sound-scape as the fell from the surrounding oaks, plopping into the lake around me.

I loosened the clutch slightly as the fish came closer, at the same time I was trying to control my breathing to keep my nerves under control, my jaw was clenched, anxiety inscribed over every millimetre of my wrinkled brow.

Momentarily the fish was high enough in the water for me to get a tantalising glimpse, it was a mirror, a lovely chocolate coloured creature that I thought could be a sparsely scaled low thirty I have seen photos of. Still it fought on.

The next time it came to the surface it had gotten smaller and was covered in a smattering of scales, it looked young and about 25lbs. Still it fought on.

The next time it came up to the surface its back was towards me and a spikey dorsal fin stood proudly erect from the saddle of its back. A crusty old set of shoulders broke the surface and as it tipped and tilted onto its side the linear scaling was clearly visible.

Oh shit, oh shit I’ve hooked Vallors. I was shaking, the panic and fear I had been keeping in check bubbled over, now sitting front and centre in my sub-conscious, ‘please don’t let this fall off’.

The next five minutes were excruciating, the calmness I had been trying to project failed miserably as I desperately, tried to convince this notoriously hard fighting member of the Frimley ‘A’ team that, the inside of my net was a good place to visit.

Eventually after what felt like the 100^th attempt the long framed linear, sat just long enough on the surface for me to dig the net under it and lift. She was mine.

The next few seconds saw me trying to calm down, this much cortisol coursing through your veins is not good for you; it’s why driving instructors have heart attacks. I have spent hours staring at photos of this fish, it was well up there on my wish list; so after a couple of looks in the net I was sure it was her.

Elation doesn’t even begin to describe the warm glow of satisfaction that washed over me as I stood in the pond looking down on a lot of carp trapped in the Frimley net.

Adam was fishing a lake a short distance down the valley, fortuitously he had already packed up from his latest session and was just packing his van when I called to yell an excited ‘beard on’ down the phone at him.

He could be with me in less than fifteen minutes and as I was yet to even weigh the beast the timing would be perfect, I was also now guaranteed fantastic photos.

I un-hooked the aged warrior in the net and slipped the folded down mesh into the sling and lifted her onto the mat. The ruebens recorded a weight of 38lbs 12oz and she was slipped back into the lake to await my photographer.

The photo shoot went without a hitch and as I was now the only angler on the lake, without Adam, I would have been doing self-takes. As always the photos Adam took were flawless, photos mean different things to different people so it is important to have a photographer that feels the same about capturing pixels as you do.

I had missed the crossing so I was going to be late home, I found it hard to care a single jot.

That was going to be my last session before we went on our annual French fishing trip on the 11^th October but, buoyed by my success I decided to squeeze one more Frimley trip in before we left.

What a damp squib that turned out to be, not a single fish caught to anyone for the two days of my session and not a clue as to where I should be.

The thought that in 10 days, I would be reclined on the banks of a French paradise, hopefully having cradled a couple of European giants, made blanking more bearable than normal.