Someone Stop The Rain

With still over a week to go in the month of June, we have already doubled our average rainfall for the month with just shy of 7" having fallen out at the golf course.  The last two weeks have made it painfully obvious that we really need to make an investment on some additional drainage on the flat, upper holes of the golf course.

All told in the last week we have spent close to 150 man hours pumping and squeegeeing water off of holes 6 and 11, and there are still some large puddles of water out in the rough, and the fairways are extremely soggy.  Hopefully the rain cycle we have been stuck in takes a break here soon, I would love to get to use our irrigation system at some point this summer....

The ditch on 11/12 was overflowing into 11 and 6 fairway by Thursday evening.

Hole 11 fairway on Friday morning after the rain.  Not one drop of this water
drains on its own, it all has to be removed with pumps.

Cleaning off 6 fairway on Friday afternoon.

The cartpath between 6 and 11 is an absolute muddy disaster after these
big rains, and is high on my priority list for adding gravel to later this summer.

The worst part about all of this, is that it isn't a new problem.  Now in my 4th summer at GFCC, I would wager that we have wasted close to $10,000 in labor costs pumping and squeegeeing water off of holes 6 and 11.  The only summer we didn't have to remove any water was in 2012, which was a very dry year.  

Unfortunately, the real issue is that those two holes drain nowhere, literally.  They are almost perfectly flat.  The addition of the ditch in front of 6 tee, and the sump box in the right rough on 6 up by the green back in the 90s has helped some, but was really just the beginning of the fix.  The only real solution would be to rebuild those two holes and reshape them with catch basins and proper drainage.  Since that isn't a feasible option for us, I will be looking into some options for adding a significant amount more drainage tile in them this fall.