Course Manager's Fortnightly Course Update (13/01/2023)

Course Manager's Fortnightly Course Update (13/01/2023)

Introduction

Welcome to the first of these emails in 2023. I hope you are all well and enjoying the course and club when you can. The weather has been against us recently but I feel that with the increase in rainfall we are in a much better position now than in previous years, more on this later. Next month we have a visit from The R&A to discuss the qualifiers both agronomically and logistically, where we will walk the course and discuss what has happened over the last 6 months or so, I think we are in a relatively good place and the work carried out this Winter has been excellent. Of course there is room for improvements on most areas of the course and we will endeavour to continue these improvements. I must say however from the point of view of the Green-team, we understand that Hesketh is a club and course predominately for it’s members. Our targets and goals, are not set for 2 days in June but rather from one day in March until the end of October. We want to present a course that will obviously improve as the warmer seasons kick in, but starts off at a standard that all can enjoy playing, of course we will be dialling in more detail in June (this is helped by 8 extra volunteer greenkeepers from neighbouring courses and £300,000 worth of tournament support machinery on site) I guess what I am trying to say is that yes, we have one eye on The Open qualifiers but we want the course to be set up and played to tournament standard from March – October.

Drainage, Plans and Statistics

The Drainage sub-committee is still meeting on a regular basis and as I have mentioned before, consists of Ian Clark, Alan Tillbrook, Russell Hick, Ken Critchley and myself. We keep in close communication via what’s App group and meet monthly. Over the last couple of weeks we have been met with lots of rain, in fact up until Thursday 12th January, we have had 140% of the total average precipitation historically for January. That is a lot of water, the pleasing part of it however is that most of the work we have carried out is allowing the course to dry up much quicker, the drains on 8 and 9 installed last year have made a huge difference, The outlet at Stanley is flowing great, The pumps are pumping the water very well. But we are all in agreement that we have to do more. More drainage improvements on holes 3,5,8,12 and 13. More jumbo hollow tining and solid tining on a number of fairways, more sand top dressing, introducing  Mole ploughing to wet areas improving ditch shapes and depths to remove risk of land slippage, altering pump floats throughout the year to sustain an acceptable height of water in the ditches, Jetting the ditches on a regular basis and keeping an accurate management plan, maintenance programme and map of everything that has been and will be done through These are all forming a plan for this year and future years to protect our course against wetter Winters and an increase of rain that falls in deluges in a short period of time.

Course Closure

Even with all the above positive drainage work, there are still times when, unfortunately we have to close the course, this as pointed out above is due to the amount of rain that falls in a short period of time, but even after the puddles have gone the ground remains very soft in places, this has shown over the past couple of weeks where members in buggies have got stuck and caused damage to the course. This has given us no option other that to ban buggies as it is not safe for a buggy to be permitted on holes 3-13.

The next step that is being discussed is the banning of trolleys, this is something we really do not want to do but feel it may be necessary.   I would ask again that if you are able to carry please do so, keep away from edges of greens and bunkers and adhere to the white lines, posts and stakes on the course if you have a trolley.

On Course Activities

The last 2 weeks have seen us turf a number of areas across the golf course to improve playability and aesthetics, the highlight in my eyes is the removal of the red shale path leading to the white 15th tee behind the 14th green, this removes the unattractive and possible unfair lie for those that play too long an approach to the 14th green. Other work has included marram planting and lots of hand weeding. We have installed extra fairway irrigation to the start of 7 and this now allows us to have full coverage of the path leading from the tee and all of the fairway.

Over the next 2 weeks we plan to remove all stumps from 14,10 and 8. We also plan to install new irrigation lines to allow us to water the 10th, 12th and parts of the 13th fairways during the Summer months. There is also a small amount of turfing required and bunkers on 6 and 14 will receive some attention to their surrounds and grass quality.

Conclusion

Finally, the forecast for this weekend is horrendous, currently they are predicting heavy torrential rain from 9pm Friday until 12pm Saturday. As always, we will endeavour to open as many holes as possible without any damage being caused to the course. Following this we have freezing temperatures forecast for Monday and Tuesday with a high probability of snow, then it improves slightly but to look on the bright side we are only 12 weeks from the start of Easter and from then on in, hopefully warm weather.

The Green Team

Contact: coursemanager@heskethgolfclub.co.uk

07506940432

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