We finally see some sun!
After another half inch of rain on Monday, the sun came out and the temperatures shot straight into spring. We have been going hard after the bunkers this week. This week was the first week we have seen nighttime temps stay above freezing in a long time which means we are able to pour the capillary concrete. We finished excavating a number of bunkers and installed new drainage.
Besides the sand being highly contaminated with silt, the old drain pipe and gravel was not well suited for moving water through a bunker for 30 years straight.
New pipe and gravel is installed in all the bunkers before the capillary concrete goes down.
Two concrete trucks carrying 9.5 yards of capillary concrete each showed up on a bright and sunny Thursday. Our guys lay the permeable concrete out in a nice 2 inch layer. This concrete can flow water at over 100 inches an hour. What that means is that these bunkers will very rarely wash out anymore, and the sand will stay clean and consistent for a long time. We plan to start filling up these bunkers on 7, along with 8, and 9 fairway bunker tomorrow and next week.
As we continue with the bunker work, all of our spoils are ending up behind the current black tee on 9. A new black tee will be formed here, adding about 35 more yards on for the big hitters. The plan is also to move the blue tees back to the current black tee, which will bring the fairway bunkers back into play and make #9 a little more challenging.
The new black tee is detailed on our current Golf Course Improvement Plan. For #9, we also plan to modify the left fairway bunkers when the Sabot closes for the irrigation and greens resurfacing projects in November. These projects, along with more tee renovations on 18 Sabot, 7 Sabot (gold tee) and 12 Manakin (gold and green tees) are detailed in the Improvement Plan
which was developed by Andrew Green in 2013. At the time, Andrew worked for
McDonald and Sons golf course construction. Around 2015, Andrew broke off into
his own architecture firm and now is responsible for complete rebuilds at the
likes of Congressional, Inverness, Oak Hill and he is about to start Scioto and
Bayville. All the architectural changes we have made over the past two years
have come straight out of Andrew’s master plan and are discussed with him and
the Green Committee frequently. The plan is posted to the front page of the Blog and while many
things have changed since 2013, the core philosophies are right on target for
our club.
Our stump grinder contractor was out for the second time this winter. One more day of work and they should be about finished. Stump grinding is about the only thing we like to contract out since this $75,000 machine can make quick work of the stumps.
Earlier in the week we poured some non-porous concrete in front of our aggregate storage bays. Previously the concrete slab was not wide enough to handle the size of our topdressers and we would just end up with a mess of wasted material in the old gravel. The new concrete gives us enough space to scrape up any spilled sand and keep this area more tidy.
Our remaining satellite control boxes for the Manakin irrigation system arrived on Wednesday. These 10 boxes will complete the replacement of the 20 year old boxes currently on the Manakin. These new boxes obviously give us extreme reliability when running water at night.
We hope you enjoyed the sun, more rain is on the way!