Here comes another hurricane bringing more rain for the weekend. We have been getting crushed with rain weekly in October. This combined with a massive lack of sun and cooler temperatures has meant soggy conditions, especially on the low lying Sabot course. Temperatures will take a nose dive over the next week as well, we can only hope for some sun to come out.
We have had plenty of rain to keep our bluegrass seed wet but it has been very slow to come up. It is starting to show its face now and we will begin fertilizing as the bermuda heads into dormancy. The bluegrass from last year are dark patches out there and the new stuff is still light green. There will definitely be some Poa annua mixed in this year, as it was last year, but we can deal with that later in the winter/spring.
We dodged enough rain this week to get our projects on the Sabot finished up. Remember the old bentgrass blue tee on 5?
There is the new one covered in Latitude bermuda. It has been moved to the right and expanded in order to line up with the fairway better and create over double the teeing space.
We dropped the tee in front of the blue tee down about 3 feet in order to steal soil for the blue tee. It will remain in rotation for the white tees.
The fairway bunker on 2 has been erased. The knob on the green side of that bunker was pushed into the bunker in order to fill it in. This will create a better entrance for carts into this fairway and it allowed us to keep this bank high in order to hide the cartpath. It is hard to capture the scale of these projects with a picture. The team has worked very hard the last two weeks laying over an acre of sod on top of these improvements!
Work continued behind 17 green Sabot this week also.
There is still some brush work to finish up but the new view is pretty amazing. You can easily see all the way to 16 tee from the clubhouse. Our lake line is beautiful and now we can see it!
The view and overall feel from 17 approach is totally different now and really lets the green stand on its own.
With all the rain over the past few weeks this swamp area on 4 had gotten embarrassing. We cleaned out years of mulch and muck and put some new drainage in.
We covered up some firmer muck with new wood chips which should get us through the winter. Next year we have every intention of paving this area and the path to 5 since it is used so frequently.
The Manakin is not exactly being left out of the fun, although most of their staff has been on the Sabot humping sod all week. Jacob has jumped into another satellite box swap on 7 tees. Every sprinkler head in the ground has a single wire that runs back to these boxes. 2 new boxes will run 150 sprinklers so that means 150 wires plus one single wire that connects all the heads together. The new system on the Sabot will just feature two wires. The wire path will run from head to head and there will be no satellite boxes. Both systems work, one is just 20 years ahead technology wise!
Our Manakin greens are more than ready for some holes next week. The rain, lack of sun and fact that they haven't been opened up in 5 months has them looking yellow and tired. The greens will not heal as fast as normal but we will have them putting smoothly as fast as possible!
