On The Course This Week

Before I outline the course work for the next several days leading up to Advance Week a few thank you's are in order. First I would like to express my appreciation to the members that were here on the evening of August 5th to cleanup any small branches that the crew hadn't got to since the wind storm 2 weekends ago. Mrs. Kelay Ohlhauser  assisted in coordinating the group and they worked for a couple of hours and enjoyed some food and beverage afterwards. I wish I could remember the names of everyone so at the risk of missing someone I won't try.

The second thank you goes out to the membership as a whole for enduring the topdressing program last week. We compressed greens, tees, approaches and fairways into 3 days. It went well and the golf course is going to get a break for awhile. From this date forward we do not want to disrupt the playing surfaces until the tournament is over.

Golf Canada, Tower Scaffolding and SER have been setting up infrastructure since early last week and they will continue 7 days/week until they are finished. Now the presentation of all that is built upon the steel will begin to take shape giving our course the real look and feel of a major golf event In Canada. There is obviously some wear and tear to deal with especially across 9 fairway (as usual). We made the decision to use the single crossing point rather than spreading out the traffic in order to keep damage limited to one area. It will be marked as a crossing point so it won't affect play

On The Course:

Mowing Heights
The fairways and collars will see a slight drop in mowing height as requested by the LPGA. The cut on greens will remain the same. We feel that with rolling and control of moisture we can attain speeds and roll befitting the demands of Professional golfers. However the greens can sustain lowering if need be. Hopefully the weather cooperates with us for a change this summer and we have dry conditions the week of.
The rough will be brought up to 3 inches beginning on Wednesday, August 7th. It is healthy, dense and green. Bad news for those playing over the next 10 days so keep it in the middle.

Bunkers
Good timing here. They are in need of another thorough sand adjust and complete edging especially after all the heavy rains we have experienced this season. The goal is to attain the type of lip we currently see on the front faces and less of one on the shallow back faces (approximately 1 to 2 inches). Steep back faces will naturally have a deeper lip as we do not want to pull too much sand up the slope. Ideally we only want 1 to 1.5 inches of sand covering any slope in order to keep balls from staying high and not rolling down to the floors (bottom) of the bunker. Or at least that's the theory.

Presentation
As you can see we are repairing many unsightly areas on the perimeter of the course. We are also in full conversion to fine hemlock/cedar bark chips in our move away from pine straw/needles shipped in from the USA. We have added many new areas around the course and I hope you like the look. It will mean a concerted effort at weed control in the future but we feel it's worth it.

All for now,
Wade