Still hot, so hot that just rigging up brought me out in a sweat. I hadn’t been to Woodlands for a few seasons and it is much more overgrown than I remembered it. We fished the far end, Micky Minnow’s theory being that the fish would be in the deepest water due to the heat. A combination of overhanging branches and a long tail between hook and float due to the depth made float fishing for someone of my ability fraught and I fairly swiftly switched to ledgering with a running bomb. Pretty early on I hooked and landed a carp which fell just short of being a double at 9lb 8ozs, but still my best carp from Woodlands and my best of the season. After that, despite a plethora of bubbles in the swim, things went pretty quiet, I lost something that threw the hook and felt landing net size if not massive and had a few half bites. Micky moved around to the ‘dark bank’ and had a tench of about 2lb. We’ve never thought of this as much of tench venue, but tench bubbles were much in evidence so maybe the tench have now gained a foothold. I had a couple of goes with sprayed maggots on the drop but was hitting ridiculously small rudd and roach and the despite sweetcorn’s famed ability to sort out better fish, it just seemed to produce suicidal midget perch. It came on to thunder and rain as we left and, perhaps it was the weather, the Ringwood in the Albion was not up to the Royal Oak’s standard.