A very nice total of 40mm of rain this week and it virtually all soaked in.  We haven't had many rain days that have affected golf this year so it was a nice break for the courses with a day of no play on Tuesday.  It was then a bit bizarre after the cold rainy Tuesday to arrive at 5am Wednesday morning to 21° and quite balmy conditions for July.

 
We have been lucky so far this year with the temperatures we are getting and the amount of sunshine but it's not enough to cause any serious growth or recovery from the vast amount of play the courses are getting.  I counted 462 names on the timesheet this morning and with that number of players and the way so many of them treat the courses it's hard to produce top quality playing surfaces, but we are doing a heck of a job.  A couple of photos below showing 8W green on Thursday morning with four totally untouched pitchmarks within a few square metres and several others poorly repaired and at least another six were totally untouched elsewhere on the green.  The other photo is of footmarks on the 328 practice green where somebody has stood for some time repeatedly putting.  This is a fairly common occurrence and normally causes a burn but in this case they have actually broken through the turf canopy which is something I have never seen before.  If you think that this type of putting drill will help your game then please put a towel on the ground and stand on that to protect the turf.

Footprints on the PPG.

Completely untouched.😞

With so much play we change holes seven days most weeks so finding pin placements is not always easy.  The photo below is of 18R green with four metres of dew removed revealing how much green surface is left for hole locations.  When you consider the mound in the middle of the green it further reduces potential locations.  So a 550m² green is left with less than 100m² of ''fair'' pin placement area in which I have allowed for four metres from the edge and relatively flat around the cup area.  (There is no actual rule or law for this, just guidelines.)  It is a particular problem on the River greens which are what is known as ''sectionalised greens'' meaning that there are distinct (normally three) pin placement zones within the green surface.  With very slow plug recovery at the moment and over the coming months there will be times where we will need to get a bit edgy with some hole locations.

Good luck finding 14 hole locations in the next 14 days?