Dams full

With the recent rain the course has received a much needed drink and both main dams are now full. Good rain in the past couple of weeks had helped, but with around 40 mm at the course on Saturday afternoon and evening we should have enough water to get us through the summer months. The pump was to be installed in the river in early January if we didn't recive signicicant rainfall. We will now be able to wait until our dam levels reach the point where we need to consider installing the pump.

Fairway margins - you may have noticed some blue lines on the margins of some of the fairways. These blue line represent the suggested mowing lines for the fairways. This is done each year to re-align the fairways and align them with the guidelines. These are:

• Average width of around 25 metres – allowing for some narrower areas and wider areas depending on the hole and the distance from the tee (landing zones) 
• Keep the fairways on the flat areas that had been designated as fairway – allow first rough cut on the flat area also 
• Avoid bare areas caused by trees and tree roots 
• Emphasise shape of hole encouraging players to play a certain line especially on holes that have a dogleg

These guidelines have been developed using material from previous reports including the Goodfellow report (2007) and in consultation with the course superintendant. With the current sprinkler system the most effective watering occurs within the head to head sprinkler area. Our fairway sprinklers are rated at effective range of 16.5 metres and currently the average spacing is around 20 metres. Therefore relying on sprinkler irrigation alone we can only maintain good quality grass to around the 20-25 metre range.

There are areas on slopes that we have struggled to grow grass in the past and the fairways have been shaped around these areas to avoid bare areas on fairways. An example of this is the tongue on the left of the 3rd holes in the medium driving area. The quality of this grass has improved over the last couple of years with renovation and we are now going to trial cutting some of this back to fairway along with part of the tongue on the right closer to the tee. There are other areas where we have marked to lengthen or widen the fairway to correspond to the fairway sprinkler irrigated area. We have also marked the right of the 2nd fairway further left to slow balls down running towards the ponds. These are some examples of the marking that has been performed in the last few weeks.

Overflow near ladies 9th tee submerged