Tuesday Club - "Draining The Ditch"

We had looked long and hard at the state of our approach road and felt that a major cause of it's deterioration was that a ditch on the Crawley(west) side did not drain properly.

Our investigations showed a flaw in the culvert next to the road which had been extended badly by adding 12" sections at each end of a 6" culvert thus creating a discontinuity which attracted all the twigs etc. to cause a blockage (we have frequently cleared these over the years).

To get over this we decided to bypass this culvert by adding a drain across the road into the stream on the lake side. During the first week in March a team led by Dave Edwards (who owns a 1.5 ton digger) including Doug Reed, Geoff Manning, Bob Wallace, Jerry Hayter and Keith Hiscock worked away. 

First we had to clear the site removing several saplings which had grown near the road and then start digging on the East side knowing that we might find two or three water pipes a telephone cable and an 11kV supply cable!. Sure enough we found them the first telephone cable was not where we expected and we found it with the digger (fortunately when we called in the BT engineer he tested it and found it was an old one not in use so we dug by hand and found the modern cable and a 2" iron water pipe which we treated with kid gloves as it was rather rusty. This gave us our first depth requirement and we dug the trench from the road to the stream.

Then we moved to the West side and started digging and managed to cut a water pipe - we knew where the stopcocks were so this just delayed us while we bailed out the trench and repaired the pipe (Mrs Taylor from the left hand house was very forbearing as she lost supply for a couple of hours). So we thought we were on the home stretch and laid the section of pipe down to the stream as we'd detected only one target and assumed the power cable had branched of through the woods.

Next morning we very quickly found the RED power cable (behind the rusty water pipe – in r/h picture) very well protected and intact but much deeper than expected so we had to lift the section we'd laid (the previous day) and lower the trench by a further 8" to get our pipe under the cable and luckily we still had a reasonable fall to the stream.

This day went well and we finished the trench with no more incidents laid and joined the pipe and concreted the ends and reinstated the road by 5pm on Thursday. 

Friday morning we removed the shuttering from the stream end and dug out the coffer dam on the west end and - WHOOSH - the ditch emptied into the stream.... IT WORKS! ... And we completed before the ‘road re-surfacing’ gang wanted to start.!!!

Geoff Manning

Stop Press:-

For those who haven't been down to the lake recently, a new "Race Course" black-board has been commissioned, and erected on the clubhouse outside wall (facing the lake) in-between the main sliding glass entry doors and the Galley window.

Bob Wallace

Happy Sailing !!!