Once again Mother Nature proved who is in control and what she can hand you. We started out last Saturday night with 1.1” of rain. Sunday I thought we would be fine, we had to pump bunkers on the South course and just raked the North bunkers. Then on Monday and Tuesday it really rained in 2 different storms! Our total for the week was just over 6”. This photo is from the job site, water was coming in so fast that it was going over the emergency spillway on the old pond.
With all of the rain, mucking out the pond was out of the question so Big Al and his crew tackled a different problem with water. We have several areas along this area where the water table is so high that it just percolates out of the hill side. The area in the photo below is where a new cart path is going to be installed. Obviously this is not going to happen unless additional tile lines are installed. You can see the water coming out of the hill as he is digging the trench.
LUI’s crew installed a tile line along the entire length of the hill to catch the water and get it in a tile and then downstream. I was amazed how much water can come out of the ground when you hit a vein of it. A trench was cut with a backhoe, the trench was wrapped with a geotextile, and then pea rock and tile are installed. LUI also installed some surface inlets to catch the surface water and get it into a tile. The hillside dried up very quickly and we could actually drive vehicles through the area.
This is the outlet for the trench, you can see how much water was re-directed into the new tile.
Golf Course Architect, Tim Liddy was scheduled to come to the job site but with the slow down in the work we postponed his trip until next week. By Friday afternoon the crew changed jobs and moved back to moving much out of the pond and hauling good soil into the area.
On Saturday their golf course shaper Daniel was able to work on the green site. He rough graded the green and a few bunkers.
The irrigation crew has done about all that they can until some more grading is completed around the green. The plan for next week is to install the new 36" tile through this entire area. Once LUI has Tim Liddy's blessing on the green shape and bunkers they will push very hard to complete it. Hopefully the forecasted rain stays away!