No one asked for 5.5" of rain!

 

Both courses were playing nice and firm for the first two days of the Valentine last weekend. Mother Nature then put her finger on a nasty thunderstorm and stopped it right on top of us Sunday morning. Almost 3.5" fell in the same two hours that we would of been getting ready for the final round. Once the rain finished our entire team scrambled and work together to put both courses back together. We switched the event over to the drier Manakin and let them shotgun at 10am while the members went and played the Sabot at 9am off #1. Our team is always up for the task and more than used to be thrown curve balls by the weather!

This week we had our 3 day closure set to perform our annual maintenance to the bermuda on the Sabot and aerate the greens for the fall. We got after it on Monday, verticutting the all the front 9 fairways as well as most of the approaches and tees and aerated 12 greens. At lunch it started drizzling and then another thunderstorm stopped dead in its tracks and soaked us with 1.8" of rain. That created a delightful mess for the week.

The less aggressive triplex verticutter is used on the tees and around the greens.

The rain complicated things quickly Monday afternoon. The "sprigs" were soaked and needed to be left alone to dry. We were able to get a few fairways cleaned up Tuesday but more rain came Tuesday night. The dry air finally came in Wednesday and Thursday and allowed us to clean up the front nine. Verticutting the back nine fairways is more or less out of the question. We will topdress those fairways on Tuesday next week.

5 fairway verticut, rained on, raked up, blown, swept, topdressed, brushed, blown and mowed. This process is arduous but it is the reason these Sabot fairways have tightened up and become more dense and healthy of the past few years. 

Our sand based greens were much easier to get aerated around the weather.

The small quarter inch plugs are easy to manage and still make a big enough hole for sand to get in to. At 2 inch spacing there is plenty of air getting into our profile after this aeration to set up some root growth as soil temperatures eventually drop.

Kiln dried topdressing sand screened to USGA specs is brought in from the eastern shore of Maryland. 

About six greens were brushed in before the rain on Monday and then we finished the rest on Tuesday. These small holes should not impede ball roll that much over the weekend.

We swapped grooved rollers on to the greens mowers and performed a dry cut Wednesday. We should be able to mow these greens in the dew over the weekend.

Here is a good picture of two ballmarks. The one on the left is a relatively fresh mark that has been properly repaired. The one of the right is a recovering mark. You can see bruised leaf tissue on the mark on the left and the resulting void is almost unavoidable in the late summer. The simple impact of the ball on bentgrass in the summer is going to result in a bruised void. When you look around on the greens and see these voids the comment of "people aren't fixing their marks!" is not accurate. Rarely are these marks impacting ball roll, just ask Sam Beach and his 14 under par 3 day stretch last weekend. The bentgrass is recovering and will continue to do so in the fall.

Enjoy the fireworks and the long weekend, only a few more weeks left of summer!