August 2023 (Part 1 of 3)

 A little more time has elapsed than I anticipated since my last update ( a bit of an understatement) , I apologise for this, it is an area where regardless how pressed for time I am, I need to improve as I believe it is important to continue lines of communications from Course Maintenance to Members and the reason I first started this way back when!. 

Given the time- frame I will surmise the past few months over a three installments and then I plan to commit to finding the time, somehow, to update at least monthly even if just a short snapshot. 

Once again my apologies.

So let’s get stuck into it

Despite the slow growing winter period, the so called off season, ( do we actually have one anymore), has been very busy, We have held a number of our major events, not least the Pro-Am, Capel Cup, Ladies Invitational and a few Vet events, all requiring additional time and preparations to take the course to a standard befitting these events. 

We received very positive feedback for the condition of the course from players involved and my thanks to the staff for their dedication and tireless efforts. Most importantly I would like to once again acknowledge our very important volunteers for their work, not just leading up to these events but year round, for their incredible selfless dedication to the Golf Club. Never is anything too much for them, thank you, on behalf of the staff. 

Other factors which effect how busy are through the winter period is staff leave, it is a great time for staff to take their leave outside of the hectic Summer period, it is also the main period for TAFE education with our 2 apprentices attending 4 x 2 week block releases from March through November, that is a total of 16 weeks between them without leave that we are short staffed, whilst we do have casuals they do not come anywhere near covering the full amount of missing hours leaving the rest of us to pick up the slack.

Goes some way to explaining my lack of time for news updates. 

With less mowing requirements, our winter maintenance period covers a number of project type works with machinery maintenance also high on the agenda, things such as roller rebuilds, replacing bearings specially on our older equipment Tees, aprons mower, the older fairway mower etc to have the equipment ready for the following season.

For project works, we highlighted last year our shade issues and problems that are associated with trees, so our volunteers focus on tree line branch pruning, and dangerous / dead tree removals, continuing our path installations plans and general help where required, and with the number of storm events there is always plenty of cleanup work to do.

We have as part of our winter maintenance period this year continued bunker renovations, including shaping faces, removing contaminated sand where required and replenishing with clean sand.  As can be seen in the pictures a number of tree roots also removed.

 

With limited machinery available, and using our own finite sand, this is a very labour intensive commitment, with pulling out suitable sand and transporting through the course, dumping and spreading. Works within the bunker are also mainly manual as the narrow construction methods for sand bunkers limits large machine use so removal of sand is often manually shoveled as is the removal of tree roots and shaping of faces and levelling of bases.

It is for the above reasons we target 1/3 of the course bunkers per winter period for maintenance work like the above. I am pleased to report after this 3 year cycle every bunker has now  had contaminated sand removed, fresh sand added and base work levelled.  

This is not to say our work is complete, Sandbunkers are constantly evolving with wind, rain, player (correct and incorrect) raking and normal maintenance preparations for play all combining to mean they never stay level or free of contaminants as when first attended to.

Ideally we twould attend every bunker annually, replenishing sand, levelling bases etc, however labour, equipment and sand supply need to be carefully managed and are not an infinite resource we have at our disposal without significantly increasing cost or neglecting other important maintenance programs, for this reason we attend the 1/3rd bunkers on a rolling 3 year cycle with patch up work in between, it does mean there are some bunkers further behind others with forward slope of the base particularly towards the end of their cycle, we do our best to limit these instances.

 Our Next Sand bunker renovations upcoming are the 2 greenside bunkers on 10, these will be attended to in late spring rather than winter as there is some turf laying involved and need better growing conditions than winter offers to allow a quick root take near the bunker edges.

Staying on bunker conditions, we have increase our raking “prong” depth after feedback indicating some of the older bunkers were to hard. This will mean all bunkers will play softer as a result, we will continue to assess how soft they become during varying weather conditions and attempt to find a balance (providing a perfect lie for a HAZARD), yes the last bit was a tad sarcastic. Bunker preference is very subjective and no one condition suits all, some like it firm others a little a “softer for feel”.

I will leave it there for this installment with plans to add another in the coming days to cover other areas we have been busy with through winter.

 

Till then,  Happy Hooking !

Or given this updates subject,

 Happy  Sandblasting !