22mm in the rain event yesterday and hardly a drop ran off which was very welcome as we were getting quite dry again and the pump situation hasn't been helping.  It has been a very dry August and September period although the water table is still holding up which is evidenced by the dams at 7 / 8 West still holding a good amount of water.  The 22mm takes us over two metres of rainfall for the year with three months to go.  Rainfall records for the Tweed Heads site have been kept since 1886 and in the 134 years there have only been 30 years when over two metres has been recorded with eight of those happening since 2006.

Back to the pump station and a couple of repairs this week have us pumping at about 80% and with a new manifold delivered today and hopefully installed early next week we should be back to full capacity which will be nice.  It was a good week on the repair side as well with no pipe blow outs and just a couple of niggly little problems in the satellite control boxes.

We were able to get the greens on both courses de-thatched today which is quite rare to get that done in one day.  The forecast rain obviously put a few people off and we were able to take full advantage.  We also started to de-thatch the West collars today which is the area immediately around the green.  The constant edging and work done to the greens means that the green surface level can fall below the collar and create what us turfies call a "well'' effect.  So we will be starting to de-thatch the collars more often to try and combat this issue.

I was watching some old golf tapes last week and came across this promo from the 1998 Victorian Open and Golf Australia had their own show with none other than Cool Tweeds Nicole Lowien as host.  I must say I don't remember the show but it just shows how far golf has fallen down in the ''must watch'' stakes.  Hopefully the boom that is currently being experienced in golf around the world will lift the games profile back up somewhere near where it was.  That 1998 Vic Open was played at Victoria GC in Melbourne and the crowds were absolutely huge and it was played without any big names apart from the leading Australians of the day.  Incidently it was won by West Australian Brad King who was a looong hitter in those days....wonder whatever happened to him?