Winter Still Shows

 Hard to believe that we haven’t seen any golf played across the Hermitage campus in 20-plus days. The snow and ice storm that hit us at the end of January is still making its presence known, even today, with signs of the lingering ice around both courses. We’ve finally had a couple of “nice” days well above freezing, allowing the ice to begin melting and slowly working its way down into our catch basins.

Anything that continues to receive direct sunlight has done a great job of thawing out, allowing us to finally check on some of our dormant bermudagrass turf  like here on #9 Manakin. You can see that there is almost no ice remaining at the beginning of the fairway, while the forward section still remains frozen solid. We still have a long way to go, but we’re hopeful this warming trend continues and helps clear out the remaining effects of the Arctic storm so we can put it behind us for the rest of the winter.

All three of these pictures were taken on the same day over on the Manakin course. Here on the par-5 fifth hole, you can see there is still plenty of ice present. Considering we are well past the winter solstice, the sun angle will continue to improve, and the days are becoming longer each and every day. We continue to stay optimistic on the resume of winter golf sometime next week! 

With the majority of the cart paths still covered in a solid layer of ice making it nearly impossible to regularly get around the courses we’ve kept plenty of the team busy around the maintenance shop. We’ve been getting our inventory up to date and making room for items that need to depart our dump area. Here we have a couple of guys organizing our paver stock and getting some leaves cleaned up. 

I’m sure many of you remember our “Old Faithful” geyser experience last July. Here’s a quick picture as a refresher. Check out this link to re-read July 24ths blog. 

We finally got the mini-excavator back up to the Sabot putting green to repair this the right way. Back in July, we opted for a quick fix considering it was JULY and we needed to get our water back up and running as quickly as possible. Now, with the pump house offline and water demand nowhere near what it is in midsummer, we have the opportunity to patch this up properly and make a permanent repair.

Ben hopped in the mini and got to work. This line had been capped during the season just to get the system pressurized again. To make the proper repair, we had to dig everything back up and reconnect the water line. While we were in there, we also added a valve to isolate the Sabot putting green and several sprinkler heads around the clubhouse that had previously been fed directly off the mainline. Fixing the line itself was the bulk of the project, but installing this valve is a major improvement. If something like this were to happen again, we can now simply shut off that specific area instead of turning off the entire mainline and losing water to the Manakin course.

Winter surely isn’t over, but for the most part, it looks as if the worst is behind us. Expect saturated conditions over the next week as everything continues to thaw and drain, but also looking ahead to temperatures climbing into the mid-60s in the coming days. Have a great weekend!