Pumping Water The Other Way

Only 10 days ago we were entrenched in an epic battle trying to pump excess water off the golf course and get the place to dry up a little bit.  Now, as summer finally arrives, we reverse course and start pumping water back onto the golf course!  What a strange job this is sometimes always doing battle with mother nature, but in so many different ways....

In our first two large irrigation cycles that we ran over the weekend, we pumped a quick 500,000 gallons of water out of our irrigation pond.  Unfortunately, the pond is slowly starting to fill up with silt and sediment so it doesn't really hold much water anymore.  If we were to run the irrigation system for a week straight, with no rain and pumps to refill the pond, we could likely empty the entire thing in 7-10 days,

So with that, we scrambled on Tuesday morning to get the river transfer pump put back out in the Red.  Andy and I brainstormed up an idea over the winter to utilize a floating dock system to hook our river pump up to this year instead of the old steel cage that we junked last fall after we took the pump out.  After some sleuthing on craigslist, we scored an old dock section, reworked some of the decking, strapped some old fertilizer drums underneath of it for floats, and simply pushed it out into the river and tethered it to a tree upstream to keep it from floating up to Canada.  We then walked the pump out to the end of the dock, dropped it in the hole we cut out for it, hooked up the hose, and fired it up!  No more risking life and limb to hook up a 250 lb pump underneath a steel cage on the muddy river bank while trying not to drown like did last year....

Pumping water became much safer and easier this year with the new dock.