The installation of the irrigation system continues with 9W being completed on Thursday and open for play on Friday.  We are still waiting on the communication cable to be hooked up which is planned for next week and then we will officially be operating the old and the new system side by side.  9W has been operated manually and has worked a treat although until all the new mainlines are installed flow rates are down a little but not enough to affect performance.

As I mentioned previously there will be times where other holes are affected by the works necessitating other holes to be shortened as was the case Thursday and Friday when the new mainline had to be extended across to the next hole being 8W.  8W should be completed by Wednesday and then we move on to 7W.

While the holes are closed we will take the opportunity of no play to give the bunkers on each hole a heavy renovation including levelling the sand and adding sand where needed.  Speaking of the bunkers, all the West course greenside bunkers were ''back-faced"" this week which means the sand was dragged off the faces and exit points and levelled on the floor or playing area of the bunker.  And the River course bunkers had 30 tonne of sand added to the main play areas.

9W bunker renovated while out of play.

LHS 1R bunker topped up with sand.

The photo below shows just how much sand can be moved in a single bunker shot.  Multiply that by the number of players we have and the multiple attempts a lot of those players make to extricate themselves from the bunker and you can imagine just how much sand gets moved around in and out of the bunker.

Is that a shovel?