-Japanese version has been posted separately- 
-日本語版は「嵐をこえて　１：エイムズベリー」のタイトルで別個に掲載中です-

Four-day Fishing trip to Salisbury.

It was supposed to commence the previous Saturday when storm Dennis forced it to be postponed until Monday after.

The goals of this expedition were;

To catch the Grayling aka. “the Lady of the Stream”.

and

To get to the peak of Walbury Hill, or the highest point of the South East of England.

I started my fishing campaign on the second day of my stay.

Five rivers run through the city. Among them, the main stream is the Avon, where I spent my entire stay fishing.

The river Amesbury is said to offer the best grayling fishing, where I had my first session of the journey. 

After purchasing live bait and a three-day ticket for the fishery at a local fishing tackle shop, I drove to a swim in Amesbury. 

Luckily I was the only fisherman so had the whole stretch to myself.

The first few hours passed uneventfully, with the occasional bite by small fish.

As I trotted along the bank upstream, I ran into a dead-end where the path had turned into a floodplain, apparently because of a series of recent storms.  

Discouraged by the sight, as I was walking back to my car, I saw a pair of lads setting up their rods.

According to them, this stretch of the stream is the best for grayling fishing.

Encouraged by it, I decided to hang on a little longer.

A number of casts later, I got the line entangled on a twig beside me.

Damn it! as I was swearing at myself while trying to disentangle the line, I felt something was feebly tugging at the end of it.

At first, I thought it was a piece of rubbish or something, but before long it became apparent that it was the sensation of a fish.

With a flash of a blade, a slim silver body emerged in my line of sight.

Next moment, without having too much of a struggle, the grayling - the species I had been after for a long time - found itself in my hands.

It felt a bit anti-climactic, because of the circumstance when it got hooked (I was not even fishing!), and that it did not put up much of a fight.

However, it did not make me appreciate the beauty of this wild fish any less - with the gentle curves and its lady-like elegant garment of fins… 

Hats off to the Avon!

As it was getting increasingly colder and rainy, and I was at this point pretty much satisfied with the result, I called it a day.

One other purpose of this excursion was to visit Walbury Hill. It is the highest point of the South East of the country, the top of which is mounted by an Iron Age fort and a triangulation station.

After the morning session, I headed there, driving through neverending series of beautiful meadowlands and occasional patches of woods. It was absolutely soul cleansing.

When I got to the car park and started to walk to the peak, it started to hail so hard that it blew almost at a horizontal angle into my face.

 Twenty minutes of thrusting my way in the gail on the muddy trail took me to the peak.

The scenery of the vast grassland and forest of the south of the country was simply breath-taking - it was superimposed with the scene depicted in the hymn “Jerusalem”.

By the way, this happened to be my first solo car trip in this country.

Road rules and signs are not so different from those of Japan.

However, some knowledge and getting used to are needed in the area of for example, parking rules or roundabouts.

Luckily, there are some useful apps that helped me get through it;

・Highway Code… covers road laws and rules in the UK. A great app for learning.

・Waze...a satellite navigation app. It suggests a list of routes avoiding congested roads, sites of accidents or flood-affected areas. It also locates the speed camera and police presence.

・Spotify...The best music streaming app. If you want to go hands-free while driving, YouTube will not do but this is the one. On top of that, it has got more songs and albums than the latter with better sound quality! 

Hats off, also to modern technology! 

The swim of the day.

My first ever wild English Grayling, approximately 35 centimetres long!

Perseverance paid off! 

“The lady of the stream” indeed... dressed in its long, elegant green-tinted purple skirt of fins.

The way to Walbury Hill. 

Ominous signs started to manifest; the rain picked up, sides of the road started to form a stream, with occasional blockage by fallen trees and twigs…

Here and there, puddles began to leak out onto the floodplain.

There were a few occasions that I had to make a detour to avoid a totally submerged road.

The Iron age fort of Walbury Hill.

A close-up from the other side.

The triangulation station near the fort.

The herd kept grazing, totally unphased by the rain and winds.

Exposure of the layer of whitish half-transparent stones. 

The rain filtered through this layer of stones makes England's own clear chalk streams. This is essential to the environment for trout species such as the grayling and brown trout, because they can only survive in clear cold waters.

A bird's-eye view of the south of England.

Pheasants are the most common birds in this area. They look so tasty...