April 29, 2012

Long time coming!

It has been 244 days since Tropical Storm Irene inundated the golf course with her storm surge, and severely damaged a significant portion of the property. This weekend we decided that the new turf on the 1st and 18th fairways is established well enough to withstand play, an the holes were reopened for the Opening Day Men's Breakfast. Rick Ross and I tested the turf with an 8 iron on Friday to see how the sod would hold up. It took me four swings before I could bring myself to touch a blade of grass with the club, but once I did I knew it was ready. We received a lot of positive feedback, and your patience and support have meant a lot to us throughout the project.
There is still a lot of work to do to fine tune the fairways, and establish turf in the rough beyond the sod. After a little more seeding, aeration, and topdressing I am confident that the holes will be in much better condition than they were before the storm.
The weather will have a lot of influence on the final outcome. We have been extremely fortunate this winter and spring in that we have not had a lot of rain, but the 3" rain event early last week reminded us of our weaknesses and limitations.
As we learned last week, we are still vulnerable to flooding from the creek and pond when the tide gate is closed during high tide. After rain events the fresh water moving through the property from Young's Pond and the rest of the watershed backed up and flooded the fairways for the first three high tides. Thankfully the gate is closed and the water had a very low salt content. If that had been brackish water we would have suffered injury in the newly sodded fairways and approaches. The majority of the recovery effort has been focused on adding drainage that will help move water off the surface. The nature of the soils and the lack of elevation change make typical French drains ineffective so we installed surface collectors and created contours that will move water over the surface to the drains.
We will continue to work to improve the health and playability of these areas throughout the season, but continued improvement will require additional drainage, expanding irrigation, and specialized maintenance programs including fertility, aeration, seeding, and topdressing.
It is a huge relief to be able to open the holes this weekend, but we still have a long way to go before we achieve a level of quality consistent with the rest of the golf course and the other facilities at the club.
At this point I would like to thank my staff for their hard work and commitment to restoring the fairways, the Green Committee for their support and encouragement throughout the process, and the board for giving us the resources we needed to restore the areas. In spite of our efforts to keep the project simple, the limitations required us to spend more money on soil and sod than I had anticipated, and the club was always there with the resources we needed every step of the way.
Future blog updates will explain the problem an the proper solution in more detail, but for now I just want to enjoy this milestone. I hope you do too.

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