The door has now closed on 2015  and a new one opened in what will be my 17th year at the club.  It really has been a whirlwind time with so many positive things happening over the journey.  The weather seems to always be the dominant factor in all we do on the courses and obviously in the playing of the game. 

This Blog averages 75 hits a day with a peak up to 95 on Fridays when I normally post.  Over December there were visits from around the globe including - Australia, USA, France, Poland, Canada, Germany, UK, NZ, Portugal and Ukraine.  Many are referred to it from Google when performing a search and the most popular for that is the posts on "root pruning and or tree removal" showing that trees and grass are competitors around the world.

The busiest time for local visits is when the weather intervenes which is an all too often occurrence and hopefully we get a break from that this year.  The weather has certainly been variable over the past couple of years with the summer of 2013/14 the driest on record with just 140mm of rain followed by the 2014/15 summer being the third wettest with 1,281 mm falling.  Out of interest the summer of 1955/56 was the wettest when 1,581 mm of rain fell followed by 1905/06 with 1,345 recorded.  1956 was the wettest year on record with 3,195 mm recorded and was also the year of the "Big Flood" as it is known for Tweed Heads although a cyclone did make land in February 1954 when 884 mm was recorded but was surpassed in 1956 when 898 mm fell which is nearly an incredible 36 inches in the old terms!!

But back to the courses and the weather has already intervened this year with a very wet and humid conditions over the Christmas break which resulted in one of the worst outbreaks of disease I have seen on the West greens.  By contrast the Tifeagle on 17W and the River greens have been largely unaffected.  A New Year ring around to some of my peers reassures me that we are not alone in the disease stakes but certainly had a lot more rain than most with 70 mm recorded for the five days after Christmas Day.

Disease on 8W