Another productive week on the courses in amongst the myriad of players that we are experiencing at the moment.  Playing 2 balls means the courses are just about completely full every day after 8.30am which as I have mentioned makes it very hard to get the required work done.  It is nice to be getting some very complimentary comments about course conditions as well which is a credit to the staff.  

A few more huge dead trees taken out which doesn't leave too many left for removal.  The wind earlier in the week hampered some of our operations but fortunately some calmer conditions on Thursday and Friday allowed us to get a couple of very important plant protective products out and get some fertiliser on to the West greens and some more fairways.

It has been a frustrating couple of weeks with the irrigation system having a couple of inexplicable problems.  Some contact was even made to the pump manufacturers HQ in Denmark as we tried to figure out what was happening.  Operation during the day was ok but it was at night when the automatic program was running that we had issues.  Unfortunately the only way to really see what is actually happening is to be onsite overnight so a week of 3am starts was the call of the day.  It was a bit chilly earlier in the week but the pump shed is pretty warm with all the pumps in operation so that helped out somewhat.  It turned out (hopefully) to be a glitch in the software so we have re-loaded and started from scratch again.  Time will tell?

Golf is apparently back on in all States of the USA as from next Monday as well as much of the UK.  It's amazing to think of what happened in both the World Wars when courses pretty much closed or just sat dormant for the duration.  And here we are bemoaning playing as a 2 ball.  I remember at Kingston Heath, Royal Melbourne and Victoria GC's in Melbourne that many original bunkers were lost during WW2 when some of the Coastal Tea Tree fell over and grew over them.  A lot of these bunkers were re-discovered during a tree removal project on the courses and were duly re-instated in the 1980's.  From reading the club history of Cool Tweed, golf seemed to continue throughout WW2 although the cost and supply of golf balls was an issue.

On a recent Covid-19 bike ride I came across a plaque on the side of Fingal Road almost directly opposite the CTH clubhouse which commemorates an R and R camp that was situated there during WW2 for members of the US 32nd Infantry Division.  I wonder if part of their R and R included a boat ride across the River for a game of golf?  And speaking of R and R that's what I will be doing next week so there will be no blogpost next week. 

In my readings this week I came across this article which depicts some of what was happening on golf courses in the UK during WW2.  Incredible to think that courses were ''put to the plough'' to grow food or become a landing strip with only the greens generally untouched and maintained.