Golf course work is part maintenance, part renovation and often extensive repairs. Mother Nature dealt us a significant blow this week.Tropical Storm Andrea blew up the east coast on Thursday and Friday dumping seven inches of rain on Forest Creek over a 48 hour period. We are blessed with sandy soils that recover quickly from rainfall and rarely do we have to close the golf courses. Unfortunately, where we do not have turf cover we experience washing of the features. The bunkers will wash down off the high flashed faces. The sand cart paths wash out on steep slopes. Another problem we are experiencing is springs surfacing and running across the cart paths making them sloppy. We have had a very wet spring and the water table is very high and this moves the springs to places we do not normally see them.
Summer weather will solve our problem with the springs and cart path replacement with asphalt will solve the steep slope wash out problems. Until then our work load will increase after each rain event. It is our goal to get weather related damages repaired as quickly as possible, but sometimes it takes several days until things are dry enough to do all the repairs needed.
Steep bunker faces wash out from heavy rainfall throughout the year. We have more bunker repair work on the North golf course than the South. The high flashed bunker faces and native sand make this more of a problem on the North. Most of the bunkers on the South have a mined, washed, and screened sand from a sandpit in Lilesville N.C. It is a well draining sand with variable particle size. The North sand was native sand found on site and was neither washed nor screened. It takes several days to restore all these bunkers after a major rain event.
