We picked up 40mm of rain in the storm that came through on Monday night but unfortunately it was so heavy the bulk of it just washed off and caused some significant damage to bunkers which needed quite a bit of work to restore them.  It wasn't really the type of week that we could afford to be doing that with grass that you can just about hear growing, and we finished up with eighty hours of sick leave with two off suffering Covid and one on annual leave which left us very short for the week.  It was a great job by the boys to get what they got done considering the amount of grass that we have out there.

Speaking of bunkers needing some work to restore them, we raked most bunkers on Tuesday morning despite the rain in front of the ladies and I mowed the back 9 greens on Wednesday morning and couldn't believe some of what I saw.  It makes you wonder why we bother putting rakes out there or indeed bother even raking them.  There were only two bunkers out of the thirty six on the back nine River that had no unraked footmarks.  Here's a selection for you.

 

12R greenside took 4 to get out and nearly tripped on the rake.

 

18R fairway bunker.

17R greenside - took 2 to get out poor love.

The greens were also very soft on Tuesday thanks to the heavy rain and even though they're Couchgrass it doesn't mean that you don't have to repair your pitch marks.  Photo below shows 17R green with six totally untouched pitch marks in the frame.  One of the problems with this is that the mower comes along and scalps the raised area of the pitch mark and opens the plant to disease and fungal attack, not to mention the crater that is left there which affects ball roll. Please repair your pitchmarks.

Completely untouched until the mower scalps them.

This is the bottom mark in the photo above after the mower has gone over it and scalped the area indicated by the arrow.  Unfortunately we don't have time to repair pitchmarks prior to mowing.  As with raking bunkers it is one of the things that golfers can do themselves to help improve the courses.