First three weeks of renovation!

Great Waters renovation has gotten off to a great start! Items of interest for the first few weeks are:

- 900+ irrigation heads dug up in the first week by the Great Waters staff!

- A new wet well was installed at the pump house by ProPump and Controls

- Tree crews have made it from 11 through 18, removing trees for agronomic, design, and safety reasons.

- The course has been sprayed with roundup to avoid any contamination of the new grasses by the      previous variety of bermudagrass.
- Great Waters GCM is removing sand from the bunkers to topdress and amend the soil in problem areas.
- Sea wall work on 12 is finished!

Below are a few pictures that capture some of the progress made over the last few weeks.

Bunker sand being piled up in order to re-use and amend the soil in problem areas in fairways.

Wet well sleeve being installed at the pump-house.

Sleeve for the intake from the lake inside the wet well.

Concrete being poured around the wet well sleeve to stabilize it.

Reviving the blog

So it has been quite some time since our last update to the blog and we are going to give it another go with the new team we now have and the upcoming renovation looming on the horizon. I want to first introduce you to our current assistant superintendents. Notice that I did not say new as they have both been here for quite some time now.

First Assistant Superintendent: Brad Nixon. Brad came to us from the Landing course here at Reynolds Lake Oconee where he was the spray tech for a short time and later the Second Assistant there. Before that he did an internship at the Preserve course during their renovation. Brad got his degree from Piedmont Technical College in Greenwood, SC.

Second Assistant Superintendent: David Fleming. David graduated from UGA with a degree in Turfgrass Management. While in school, he did internships at Ridgewood CC in NJ, Columbia CC in Maryland and Atlanta CC. After graduation he went to Atlanta Country Club as the Second Assistant for two years before making his way to Reynolds as the Second Assistant at our Oconee Course. David then proceeded to get out of the business and work as a farm manager on his family's potato farm in Parrish, FL for six years before coming to Great Waters in June of 2017.

Spray Tech: Daniel Mendsen. Daniel recently graduated from Georgia Southwestern State University where he played four years of soccer, and majored in Exercise Science and Wellness. He previously worked at Lane Creek Country Club in Bishop, GA on the maintenance staff for five years. Daniel did intern  here at Great Waters in the summer of 2017 before going back to school to finish his degree.

Winter Projects

Even though it has been a very wet winter and we are overseeded we have still found a little time to complete a few winter projects.

Back in December we installed some drainage around the 150 pole in #3 fairway. This area has been doing much better since then.

We also installed a new drainage line between the cart path and the tee on #17. This is an area that has been wet for a long time and it will be nice to have it dry this year.

Also on #3, we added a new drain basin about 75 yards out on the right hand side, in the rough. This area catches a lot of runoff water from the hill to the right of the path and everything on the right side of the hole from the green. We installed the drain just outside of the fairway to try and catch as much water as we could before it traveled across the fairway to the large basin in the middle of the fairway. We still plan to come back sometime and install some French drainage from our new basin up towards the green, but for now this is helping to keep the fairway drier. You can see in the last picture that it is working and it is catching most of the water that used to travel across the fairway.

     

Overseed

Well it has been quite some time since our last post here on the blog and there was good reason for it. After the decision to overseed fairways was made, I wanted to make sure that we got it up and established before we started talking about it or putting pictures of the golf course up. 

Some of our notes about the process:

• We dropped seed on November 23rd and 24th. We did 4 holes late Monday afternoon after play and the rest on Tuesday (our closed day)
• We did all fairways and green surrounds. The only tees that were overseeded were par 3 and the practice facility tees (which were actually done back in September)
• Our first mowing was on 12-10-15
• We had mowed 4 times as of 12-21-2015.
• From 12-21-15 to 1-1-16 we received almost 12" of rain and we did not get to mow anything until 1-6-16 and then 1 time this week because of the cold weather.
• I can 100% say that the overseed is helping us dry out some from the rain. There is no way that we could have been off the path with out overseed but with the ryegrass out there we were off the path a few days last week and we are currently off with just a few hole restrictions. 

Here are a few pictures:

The courious case of #2 Green

Over the years #2 green here at Great Waters has always been healthy and fine. It still is but this year a small problem reared its head. We had an unusual rainfall event a few months ago where 4" of rain fell in about 7 hours one day. After the rain we had, for the lack of a better word, a small bubble come up on the front of #2 green. This bubble was approximately 12"x18". We knew that we had a problem because greens should be able to take much more rain/hour than this, but a 4" storm in one day is quite uncommon for us.  That bubble pretty much healed itself in 1 day by mowing and rolling over it. We knew that we would have to revisit this problem sooner or later but we did not realize that sooner would come so quickly. Late September and early October brought many cloudy and rainy days to our area. It was around 10” of rain in a 2 ½ week period and once again we got almost 4” in one day. The front of #2 green looked like we had installed a new water hazard and a large bubble was present.

Here is what it looked like after the rain stopped.

 

 

This issue was moved to the top of the list and we began putting a plan together to solve this problem.  Here is what a typical USGA spec green drainage diagram looks like, and this is what we have under our greens here at Great Waters. Coincidentally #2 green looks almost identical to this image.

 We started by going to the flush point at the high end of the green and sticking a hose in there. The thought was to try and flush out whatever type of blockage that we had in the drain line. The high pressure from our irrigation system will usually clear blocked lines with ease. However, after only about 5 minutes of running the hose, water started rising out of the green. We knew at that point that we would not be able to blow this line clear. The outfall or lower end of this drain goes into the pond just short right of the green. So now the focus turned to finding that end of the pipe. We knew that the drain had to be draining at least a little so we poured some pond dye into the flush point at the high end of the green. This would help us locate the pipe in the pond. It took quite a long time for any dye to come up in the pond but eventually it did and we got in the pond to dig for the pipe.

 

Four guys and Three hours later we had not found any pipe. The next day we lowered the water level in the pond by about 2 feet and tried again. After about three more hours with the same four guys we finally found the pipe 4 feet deep in the mud/muck. It was completely full of junk and it was going straight down into the ground. We knew this was the right pipe because just a tiny trickle of dye was still coming out.

At this point we have found the pipe, we know it is clogged up, and we know that it is coming into the pond much too deep. After much debate about continuing to dig in the pond and find where the pipe turns up to go back towards the green, we decided it would be much easier to dig a few feet in front of the green, find the pipe, cut it, and run a whole new line to the pond. Had we just cleaned out the end of the pipe and left it that deep in the pond it would have become covered over in the next rainstorm that we got. Below are a series of pictures of us installing a new line.  The drain was much deeper in front of the green than we had anticipated but since it is such a steep slope to the pond we still had plenty of fall for the new drain line.

These are the pictures from the new line installation.

 

   

As you can see by the water in the trench, there was still plenty of water backed up in the lines and when we cut it to put the new pipe on it all drained out.

 


After the new line was in and all of the sod back in place we had to fix the green where the bubble had come up. When turf rises like it did the sand underneath gets shifted around and you can get high and low spots. We really did not end up with any high spots just a good many low spots. We could have stripped the sod from this area, smoothed the sand, and then laid the sod back down, but with us having Bermuda grass greens and it already being October we knew this would not heal before winter got here. We also though about taking a cup cutter and/or a 6" plugger and spot treating each depression, but we knew that many holes cut in one area most likely would not heal either. So we decided to try an approach that some might call creative, while others might say crazy. I personally am in the creative group. We knew that water had made the turf rise and create this bubble in the first place, so we thought what if we stick an air hose into the ground and let the air push the turf up. All we had to do was figure out a way to get sand to go into the depressions while air was pushing up the turf and trying to push sand out of any holes that we were trying to put sand into. With a little trial and error we found that sticking the air hose beside each depression and making a few holes with a screw driver and a large hole in the middle of the depression that we could get sand to go into the hole and level out under the turf.  It was a fine line between not enough holes to let the sand go into and too many making the green into swiss cheese and not pushing the turf up. We spent a couple of hours on the green with the air compressor, a screwdriver, and some VERY dry greens mix and I think that it turned out pretty good. There are still a few small depressions that we will have to topdress out but nothing like it was and you can hardly tell that we even put any holes in the ground.

      

 

Here is a short video showing the air hose in action.

  

 

Finally we rolled the area with a Salsco roller.

 

This is what the area looked like earlier this week.

 

I think the finished product turned out very well and there will be no doubt about this green draining anymore.