Lots and lots of rain

New 15th green water feature

The past two months have seen the course receive well above average rainfall, which has led to the soil reaching field capacity and, as a consequence, the course becoming very wet and boggy. As previously mentioned, we had a relatively dry start to May, with the rainfall we received spread fairly evenly until we recorded 86mm for the last eight days of the month. This was then followed by a significantly wetter than average June (wettest since 1996), where to date we have recorded 200.5mm, 167mm of which has fallen in the last sixteen days.

 

This last sustained period of rainfall caused a large amount of washout damage and substantial flooding to the majority of the bunkers; the decision was made to temporarily declare all of the bunkers on the course GUR for fairness to play and to allow staff the necessary time to carry out essential repair work. Staff have spent a total of @60 hours over the past week to return the bunkers to a playable condition

 

13th fairway bunker

On a positive note, all of the drains throughout the course are now flowing steadily, with the masterlines discharging into the smaller 15th dam, which is now full and overflowing into the main 15th dam. The level of the main dam has risen dramatically over the last two weeks and I anticipate that it will be full before too much longer.

View form the clubhouse roof on Wednesday (note the blue sky!)

 

Tournament Preparation - US Open Style

As things have been fairly quiet on the course, apart from the cold and rain, over the past two weeks, I thought I'd share some information and photos about this weekend’s US Open at The Olympic Club. In addition to the championship Lake course, the club also has the 18-hole Ocean course along with the 9-hole, par-3 Cliffs course. This will be the 5th time that The Olympic Club has hosted the US Open, and all of the greens on the Lake course were re-built between November 2008 and June 2009 in preparation for this year’s tournament. There is a full time course maintenance crew of 50 staff, which will be assisted by 100 golf course superintendents, assistants and greenkeepers from 16 countries who volunteer for the duration of the tournament.

First Day of Winter

	May 2012	May 2011	average
Rainfall	123 mm	109 mm	100.5 mm
Year to Date	315 mm	304.5 mm	240.8 mm
No. of rain days	16	12	-
Average Temp.	15.7°C	15.7°C	-
Average Humidity	74.8%	74.3%	-

Last weeks rainfall total ended up at 83.5mm after we received a further 28.5mm overnight on Friday. As you can see this took us well over the average for the month of May and well above the year to date average.This also meant that all of the time we spent pumping water out of bunkers during the day on Friday was all for nothing as it was all back again on Saturday morning.

Bunker grading - extreme style!

The past week has seen us edge all of the bunkers prior to this weekends Pennant matches. The two fairway bunkers on the left-hand side of the 13th fairway have also had a facelift with a significant amount of grading work undertaken to move sand back to the high side of the bunkers. Greens have had an application of fungicide to control some small areas of disease which were present.