#18 Drainage Project Update

Many of you have been watching the progress of our drainage installation project from the windows of the grille in the clubhouse and seen some of the progress that we have made over the past couple of weeks.  If you are among the crowd following the progress from the grille windows, my guess is it has had a lot to do with the weather we have experience as of late which means it has been WET and RAINY.

As you can imagine, wet and rainy are not necessarily a friendly combination with the heavy equipment required to complete this project.  We have had to use lots of plywood to protect the turf including a trash pump on several occasions when the freshly dug ditches have filled completely with water.  To add to the fun, our soil type has a large number of boulders a bit larger than the size of a basketball.  These slow down the progress as special care has to be taken to pry them out of the way and remove them.

The good news is that we have been able to install just north of 1,000 linear feet out of the 4,000 feet that we plan to install.  To keep the pace of work moving along as smoothly as possible in addition to mandatory worker safety, we have needed to move the tee blocks forward onto the fairway to keep golf balls from hitting the drainage crew and the equipment.

This practice will only occur Monday-Friday with the blocks being returned to the tees each weekend.  We will do our best to keep the yardages as long as possible, however, there may be days where we need to play this hole as a par 3 in order to keep the balls in front of the active work site.  If you remember, this is the same practice that we utilized two years ago when we did large-scale drainage installation on holes #8 and #11 which as you can see today, worked wonders!  Short term pain = long term gain, right?  Your patience is much appreciated as we work to get this course improvement project completed.  Here are a few fun pictures of the progress we have made along the way.

First and foremost, I would like to thank and recognize the team responsible for the
hard work on this project.  From left to right, Sam Bonda, Miles Brownell and
our contractor, Daniel Soushek of Golf Plus Construction.  Great work!

We started on the left side of the fairway between the bunker complexes to capture
as much water coming off the hill as possible with two trenches following
the contour of the fairway.

This picture shows some of the WET conditions that the team has had to
work with so far.  Notice all the surface water flowing into the open trench.

This photo shows the area between the fairway bunker complexes where much
of the work to-date has been completed.

Daniel has a very organized approach to installation:  dig, install pipe, add gravel,
top with sand followed by resodding all within an hour of opening up a new trench.

This is what 4,000 feet of drainage pipe looks like.  A LOT!

One of the many rocks found.  Nobody gets excited to see these.

And another.

And again.