Drainage

It seemed tactless to send out the subscription notices and then to close the course or open it for 10 holes only. But it was closed/partially open for very good reason: there was too much water on the course.

2012 was undoubtedly wet – although many parts of the UK were worse than us – and the water level is now so high that when it rains it seems to have no-where to go. And it seems that exceptionally wet weather is going to become unexceptional.

We therefore have to see what we can do to prevent the course from being fully or partially closed as often as it had been.  We had a course walk (actually drive in buggies) to review the position.

The main problems have been:

• The 7^th, where the rock is close to the surface and water is held on the surface especially on the right side of the fairway; when this hole is unfit for play it obviously prevents access to the rest of the course.
• The 9^th, where water collects on the right side of the hole where rock is close to the surface; this has worsened recently as the gorse was removed and should improve as the gorse and grass grows back..
• The 11^th, where water collects in the fairway in front of the green, and
• The 12^th, where the second half of the fairway gets damp very easily.

The rest of the course is not too bad and does not usually prevent play except in exceptional circumstances. The work done in the last couple of years has improved the position on the 12^th particularly in front of the green and that sort of effort will continue in other places. The greens staff have also exposed the drains on the right of the 12^th fairway, which are also meant to drain the 11^th; it is clear that they are broken beyond repair and therefore ineffective.

We intend to:

• Ask a water drainage expert to review the worst areas and advise;
• Depending on the advice, re-lay drains on the 11th and 12^th fairways and improve the coverage of drains generally;
• Prepare a “wet weather” tee to the left of the 6^th green to (mostly) take the right  hand side out of play, and to rope off the right hand side GUR when appropriate; this should allow more of the course to be played even in bad conditions.
• Rope off appropriate parts of the 9^th as GUR;
• Become more disciplined about taking some bunkers out of play when conditions are bad.

Doing this doesn’t mean that the course will never be closed, or that we will never play 10 holes with a short 15^th, but it should significantly reduce the amount of time this happens.

Thoughts and ideas as always are appreciated.

 

More recently, there has been a landslip at the Dinkie; I'm told it's similar to the one that happened 20 years ago or so. It means the Dinkie is a little closer to the 18th green We intend to ask a groundworks engineer to comment but initial advice is that it is a result of water buiulding up against the clay soilbank making the ground underneath fliud so gravity eventually makes the land slip. Curing it might need some substantial drainage work underneath the bottom of the Dinkie and towards the 18th green.  This may not benecessary: we'll take advice. In the meantime, the area of landslip will become GUR until the area is stabilised and grass grows.

 

Pleasingly, despite the above, subscription collection is going reasonably well.