It's been a hectic time since my last post and I now wish I had gone to my families Christmas party in Melbourne last weekend and avoided spending 25 hours on the courses on Saturday and Sunday!  Things started badly on Saturday morning at 4.30 am when my irrigation pump flow meter was reading 5090 litres per minute, when full irrigation cycle load is only 3,700 litres per minute.  This meant either a malfunction of the meter (wishful thinking) or a big pipe break.  Unfortunately it was the latter and a six inch mainline had blown apart next to the 1st West fairway.  Hand digging was impossible due to the roots so our backhoe contractor Pete McConnell came to the rescue and excavated the hole for us.  The best part of 6 metres of mainline was replaced by myself with the assistance of our irrigation man Dave Luxton, who already had 52 hours down on his timesheet before another 6 hours were added on Saturday afternoon.  One of the critical things to be careful of after losing virtually all the water out of our irrigation pipe network is to regenerate the system very slowly and expel as much air out as possible.  To do this I need to operate some sprinklers which would have looked quite odd on Saturday evening after it had rained most of the day.  It all ended well and the system is now back in full operation waiting for the rain to end. 



Tree roots in the trench



The guilty section of pipe

You sometimes wonder what makes people tick when you see something like the photo below.  Some idiot had emptied the wheelie bin at the half way house on the entry road this morning which cost me two men for 20 minutes cleaning it up when they would have been far more productive on the golf courses somewhere!



Entry road 5.30 am this morning