Happy New Year!
Last week started where we left off, raining of course. Wednesday topped the rain gauge with over 2 inches for the day. The total for the week according to our weather station was 3.72 inches. We went from hard rain to the first really hard frost of the season on Friday. I was disappointed that we could not get the shotgun out on Friday. It's not every day in the middle of the winter when the parking lot is full and we have an opportunity to bolster the year end numbers.The frost was just too hard. We finally managed to open the front nine at 1:00pm.
Even though we had 2 inches of rain (above) on Wednesday it didn't stop our die hard Wednesday group (below) from getting in18 holes. These guys are a pretty special breed. I don't know how they do it.
The heavy rain on Wednesday brought us our second round of flooding. The usual spots saw the high water including the 6th hole, Lake A,(below) and the bunkers. Zeferino and Jorge worked through the wet weather early in the week and finished draining the green side bunker on eleven. We are making it a goal to at least finish one bunker per week until we get through the worst ones. Our next project will be the green side on twelve.
Steve finished our cart path bollards last week and replaced the old and rotten ones. Such an overall improvement on the appearance of the golf course.
Each October I schedule Paul Garska from Hydrotronix to perform an annual preventative maintenance on our pump station. This year he wasn't able to do it until this last week due to his busy work load. I always look at this as putting money in the bank. Paul tells me that each year he has to perform emergency repairs to pump stations around the state that could have been avoided by simply scheduling a multi-point inspection and maintenance procedure. To date I cannot recall ever having to call Paul out for an emergency repair in the middle of the season. In this business you can't afford to have down time when the grass you maintain is kept on the edge of drought. This is one of our most discrete operations but yet is most vital to the success of an irrigation season.
Saturday morning while waiting for the frost to disappear, I bundled up with my trusty camera and dog Ryder and went for a nice long walk around the course. (Some may remember Ryder from the 2008 Golfdom Calendar.) Dogs absolutely love golf courses. Darren Davis of Olde Florida Golf Club does this every day and I can see why. It makes such a difference to leave the cart behind and walk, it gives me more time to stop and take into account of every aspect of the golf course. Of course Darren's weather is much more conducive to this, but none the less it was dry. Ryder enjoyed the time away from his little brother and partaking in the wonderful green tootsie rolls left behind by our local flock of geese. It was a peaceful morning watching the sun rise and taking some special shots. Here are a few pics I would like to share:
This final shot is the first picture I have taken of a bald eagle on the property. I believe it is a juvenile, it was pretty high in the tree and the zoom on my camera was maxed out. When it flew it appeared to be almost twice a big as a red tail.
Finally, I made this video from a suggestion of Mark Johnson at GCSAA as a way to display some nice shots of the golf course. It was pretty simple with the Movie Maker program in Windows 7. It took just a few minutes and there it was. I have also placed it under my "Video Gallery" tab.
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