River course construction work

We've had a digger and dumper trucks on site this week digging out subsoil from the borrow area left of the 4th hole and transporting it to the site of the new 3rd green and 4th tee.  The ground level has been raised to create an area that will shed sea water in the event of future flooding and a low bund has been created to protect against flooding from normal tide levels.  The salt contaminated topsoil has been stripped off and it will be spread on the river side of the bund.

Bringing crag to the site prior to spreading and consolidating

Overseeding greens

Over the last two days we've been overseeding the greens using a machine that drops the seed into shallow slits.  The main purpose of this work is to increase the percentage of modern fescue grass cultivars in the greens.  These cultivars are very fine leaved and they produce a denser turf than the old cultivars.  Changing the botanical mix in the greens is a slow and challenging process but the long term reward will be smoother, truer and more consistent putting surfaces.

The over-seeder in action

Neil - rolling the greens after overseeding

River course construction work

After a few preliminaries over the last week or so work started today on the repair of the 3rd and 4th holes on the river course.  We had two large dumper trucks and a digger on site, excavating material from the pond on the 7th and transporting it to the 3rd green area.

Last week we were very optimistic about this work with a temporary bund being constructed on Hazelwood marshes and the marsh drying out nicely.  At the weekend the combination of very high tides and high winds breached the new bund and flooding on the course reached levels not seen since the tidal surge last December.  Needless to say, this has not created ideal ground conditions for construction work and the thunder storms with very heavy rain this afternoon added to our misery.

We've created a low bund and transported many loads of material to the site today and work continues tomorrow and early next week.  Hopefully with slightly lower tides due this weekend and the bund in place the area will dry out a little as it's quite a mess at present.

The flooding on the 3rd hole yesterday with the temporary green in the foreground

The breach in the temporary bund on Hazelwood marsh

Digging out the pond

Bunkers

We had 15.6mm of rain yesterday, most of it in a twenty minute period, the photo below shows what the downpour did to the bunkers.  It takes a lot of work to sort out over 100 bunkers when they look like this!

Weather summary for July

July was relatively warm with rainfall close to the average.  We had a total of 47.4mm of rain compared with the long term average of 45.9mm.  The last third of the month was dry with only 1.4mm of rainfall in the last 10 days.  The average temperature was 18.3° (long term average 16.8°) with a maximum of 27.7° on the 26th and a minimum of 9.1° on the 2nd.