Playing The Waiting Game

Yep.....it's still winter, and spring doesn't even appear to be in the forecast yet...

Snow depths on the course are still averaging about 16"

And of course as I look out the window to write this, it is snowing again, it sounds like we should only get 3"-5" out of this one though.  The 12" of fresh that fell last Monday was a dagger though, both physically to our flood outlook, and mentally and emotionally to myself and Andy who are just chomping at the bit to get out on the course and get to work.

Surely everyone remembers last March though right?  Here is a refresher pic.

This was taken almost exactly one year ago today, it was 71 degrees
and we had guys hitting range balls in shorts!

The forecast for the next 10 days isn't helping us either.  Seasonal averages for this time of March say that we should be having daytime highs of about 35 degrees.  Check out our lovely forecast through the middle of next week.

TODAY

Snow

High: 19 °F

TONIGHT

Snow

Low: 0 °F

SATURDAY

Mostly
Cloudy

High: 13 °F

SATURDAY
NIGHT

Mostly
Cloudy

Low: -5 °F

SUNDAY

Chance
Snow

High: 18 °F

SUNDAY
NIGHT

Snow
Likely

Low: 11 °F

MONDAY

Snow
Likely

High: 17 °F

MONDAY
NIGHT

Chance
Snow

Low: -3 °F

TUESDAY

Mostly
Sunny

High: 16 °F

Allow me to do the math for you.  Our highs for the next five days are a good 20 degrees below average.  Compare that to last year, when on March 17th we topped out at 74 degrees, and we are a good 50-60 degrees colder than last year!  I've said it before; there is no such thing as average anymore, especially in a place like North Dakota where we are about as far as possible from any large, moderating bodies of water to keep our weather "steady".

So the waiting game continues.  At this point the greens have been under ice for over 60 days now, and with temperatures that have continued to be well below average we haven't had a decent window to go out and clear snow and try to melt some ice.  If we would only have had one decent 2 or 3 day stretch in the last few weeks to get some days with some sun and temps in the upper 30's we could have gotten a significant amount of ice off of a lot of the greens.  With each passing day under ice more and more grass continues to die.

And with the continued snow cover, now we start thinking about snowmold again.  Last winter we experienced a paltry 71 days of snowcover.  This year we started continuous snowcover with a pretty good storm on Thanksgiving day, so at this point we have been buried for about 110 days, with at least another week or two to go.  While we did of course make a pretty good preventative snowmold fungicide application last fall, even those products have their limitations under such intense conditions.  We will probably end up with close to 125 days of snowcover this winter, which will put us well into the "extreme" category of snowmold potential.

And lastly, our flood outlook continues to be a bit of a guessing game.  The last forecast put us at a 50% chance of a moderate flood, and only an 11% chance of a major flood.  The worst part of the flood forecast is how late it predicts that we might see a spring flood, with our highest likelihood of seeing the crest coming in the 3rd or 4th week of April.  All that really does is just delay how soon we can finish tee and bunker projects, and then if we do have some damage to the course because of the flood, it is just that much later that we can get things cleaned up and seeded.  I would almost rather have a higher flood that would come sooner here in the next few weeks and just get it over with so we can move on....

So with that, Andy and I are STILL working diligently in the shop.  We are getting pretty thin on projects though.  For the last week we have been doing things like building and staining new benches, painting a new fuel tank we got, stripping and repainting cups, taking apart and rebuilt an old engine, made a new trailer, and believe it or not, Andy got ambitious enough to start cleaning the walls in the shop one afternoon!  Needless to say, we have finished everything that we set out to accomplish this winter, and are extremely ready to get outside and start working on the course....  Damn you global warming!

I built this trailer from scratch to haul our walking greens mowers on.  The
old trailer we used last year didn't hold the mowers in place very well so
they bounced around and got pretty banged up.

New benches

In order for us to meet some updated fuel storage and
containment requirements with the state, we had to
downgrade our old 1000 gallon gas tank to a 500
gallon tank.  I scored a used tank for $500 and got it
looking like new with a $20 coat of paint.

We stripped the paint and have repainted over 50 aluminum cups!