Wet And Wild

The first 4 days of June brought us about 2" of rain, considering that we are only supposed to get 3.5" total for June, we are well on our way to another wet month.  Coupled with all the rain from the last two weeks of May, and the course is an absolute swamp.

The most recent bout of rain ended Tuesday night, so first thing on Wednesday morning we knew what we had to do.  With the first large shotgun tournament of the year on Thursday, and the high holes on the course totally soaked, it was time to pump.

For 9 hours on Wednesday the entire maintenance staff of 13, including myself, pumped and squeegeed on holes 6, 11, and 12 trying to get as much water off as possible.  Furthermore, nearly every bunker had to be pumped out again.  All told we spent a total of close to 115 man hours pumping water on Wednesday, and I estimate that we moved close to 130,000 gallons of water off the course.

Water everywhere on hole 6

Getting the puddles off 11 fairway

Squeegeeing is such glamorous work....

The drainage vault on hole 6 at one point had 4 holes feeding it, and the 6"
drain line that exits it could barely keep up.

One of the guys on the staff took this before and after picture of the trench on 11/12 to show how much water we moved

Without a doubt I think that everyone was pretty well sick and tired of listening to pumps run and pushing a squeegee by the end of the day, but it was well worth it.  The ground is so entirely saturated right now that it would have been a solid week or more before all that water would have soaked in or evaporated.

Unfortunately, the sun never really did come out on Wednesday, so we had to do some serious roping and cart traffic for the tournament on Thursday to try and keep from destroying the course.

However, no matter how many ropes and signs I put up, there are always a
few folks that think the rules don't apply to them.  Some of the low areas in the
rough are starting to seep ground water from the water that has soaked
into the fairways above them.  

The gravel cartpaths unfortunately didn't get much of a chance to dry out
before the tournament either.  It is really difficult to try and control cart
traffic when the cartpath is almost worse of a muddy mess than the turf.