When the weather report is wrong

Wednesday night the low temperature was forcasted to be 36 degrees so we decided to water our fairways and driving range tee complex.  When I arrived at work the temperature was down to 22 degrees, 14 degrees colder than forcasted, causing a nice ice show on the golf course. During the summer growing season we are always excited when the weather forcast is wrong and the air temperature is colder than expected, but in the spring when it can cause ice wherever we ran water the night before and cause a 3 hour ice delay for our golfers. 

Mainline Break on 8 Fairway

sod ripple from mainline break

 When we came into work on Thursday morning we were greeted by this beautiful site 100 yards off the tee in 8 fairway.  We are very lucky to have a good automated irrigation system at the golf course, the only problem is when something breaks it usually does it in dramatic fashion.  This leak was caused by a junction point where our mainline feeds a 2" lateral line, the saddle that was used to supply water to the 2" lateral failed. 


hole created when mainline broke on 8 fairway

 As you can see by the second picture there was a lot of water flowing from this pipe.  The irrigation system was operating at 120 psi at the time of the break, the 6" mainline has the potential of having 1,000 gallons per minute flow at that pressure. We did not have to do very much digging at all to repair this pipe, the hole you see was completely dug by the water .  The hole was large enough to fit an entire golf cart in.  One positive to this break is that all the water from the pipe flowed directly back into our main irrigation pond on 8 so no water was lost due to this problem.

Tree prunning

One nice thing about having an assistant that spent 7 years working for a tree care company is that he loves to prune trees.  Eric spent his winter going hole by hole pruning every tree on the golf course.  The most noticeable improvement is on 11 tee box, where Eric removed all of the Russian Olive trees and thinned the Cottonwoods on the south side of the tee.  This widened the tee corridor on 11 significantly, making the tee shot much less intimidating.

The best thing about how Eric has pruned the trees is that most people will notice that something looks different, but you can't put your finger on it.  Thanks Eric for all of your hard work this winter!