A very ordinary week of weather well and truly saved by Friday's sunshine and dare I say it a little bit of warmth in the sun.  The weeks rainfall could have been worse with some of the falls recorded down south and poor old Coffs Harbour copped more than 200mm on their course yet again.  Year to date they are still behind us as we have now topped 2 metres of rain for the year including June when just 15mm fell.  The Tweed Heads rainfall site has only topped a yearly total of 2 metres on thirty occasions since 1887 - and we are only just over half way through this year!!

I have had a few queries over my time as to why we don't put out more ropes and signage to keep carts out there and the answer is well and truly demonstrated below.  On 1R tee on Wednesday morning we had a sign saying ''no carts allowed on this fairway'' and one right next to it with ''please drive all carts down right side rough all the way to the green''.  That's an early group on Wednesday morning and you could have taken the same photo throughout the day.  The area on the left of the fairway adjacent to 11R tee is one of the wettest on the entire property and yet two carts are rolling through there.

Wonder what they do at a keep left sign?

 

I saw the photo below in the Vets newsletter and thought I would offer an explanation.  The groove is caused by the whipper snipper as it trims the bunker edge and the cord almost has to make contact with the sand to ensure the grass is all cut off.  Whipper snipping the bunker edges is one of the most hazardous jobs that we do as the operator has to be head down concentrating on the edge at all times with no time to look for golfers, and with sand particles literally sand blasting them as they move around the bunker.  To ensure operator safety the bunkers are almost always snipped in front of play so as to protect the operator.  Other staff then come through and blow the debris out of the bunker and rake them but unfortunately our current numbers mean that this work is done in amongst play, and so at some stage players will come across a bunker not yet cleaned properly, which includes the groove left by the snipper.  The bunkers were done on Monday this week and the two staff allocated to whipper snip had all seventy West bunkers snipped in front of the competition field which is a huge effort on its own.

And speaking of bunkers, as we often do, this week, 95 of a possible 312 man hours were devoted to bunker maintenance on the two courses, which is over 30% of our work time - devoted to maintaining a hazard.  56 man hours were spent this week on greens maintenance which includes daily hole changing, mowing and an application of fertiliser on the River greens.  Something has gone seriously astray somewhere in the maintenance of golf courses and golfers expectations when nearly double the number of work hours are spent on maintaining a hazard than the putting greens in a week?  

 

Elsewhere on the courses and we started the root pruning program on the fairway edges that had such a great result last year and we will be expecting similar this year.  Hopefully we will get to more areas and at least the ground is nice and soft to allow good penetration for the machine.  We were also able to get all the tees solid tine aerated which should hopefully help them dry out a little as well as getting some oxygen to the rootzone.