After the usual song and dance at Waterloo station (who's traveling in the van, when is the van arriving, etc., etc.) we finally set off for deepest, darkest Surrey and the prospect of a particularly damp weekend preparing the Wey and Arun canal for its winter closure. As the work program was to be quite varied it was decided to take the London WRG trailer on its second ever outing, this meant a particularly empty bus on the way down. Congregation of all the people for the weekend was in the Foresters Arms as usual, the news that the landlord had recently changed was received poorly, no more late night water fights in that pub! The news that Matt had volunteered to cook for us all weekend was went down well but the music from the other bar did not, it was a tad packed in there.

The next day dawned way to early as usual, the usual run round half the county to collect equipment was carried out and we reached site just in time to make tea. Work was going to be varied, scrub clearing further down the canal, paddle hole lintel concrete pour, back pump outfall, stonework in the lock chamber to finish patching the wall and maintenance work on the field drainage system to prepare it for winter. Pumping the lock chamber out was to be the first job, the usual problems with getting pumps started were encountered and overcome and a start was made on clearing the land drain. Once the chamber had been pumped down far enough so that the scaffolding could be used it was found that a lot of Kango work would have to be done before the new stones could be laid. At this point I was passed the job of Stihl saw driver for the weekend and promptly disappeared in a cloud of stone dust as I started to cut the new stones to size to fit the gap in the lock wall. By the end of the day a lot of the stones had been cut up, the drain was in a better state but still seemed to be leaking/broken somewhere under the field. So it was back to the hall for dinner, beer in the pub and assembly of London WRG news.

Sunday, more of the same really. Got to site, pumped chamber down, started laying the stones and backfilling for the back pump outfall, completed the stone cutting and finally finished the shuttering for the paddle hole. The afternoon was spent doing the concrete pours for the paddle hole lintel and filling the void behind the freshly laid stones in the lock chamber. In the end we only managed one course of stone due to lack of time, mainly because of waiting for the chamber pump.

Thanks to Matt for organising the dig and most importantly for cooking all the food, I could get used to hot soup and baked potatoes on site for lunch! Despite the weather forecast the rain held off (mostly) until Sunday evening, just as we had to trudge across the fields to get back to the van, even managed to get a bit of a suntan despite it being October!