Enough frost has left the ground that we have been able to start work on replacing the cart path by the eighteenth green. This path will be a little wider and moved to the left, near the treeline. We have been very diligent trying to hide cart paths and getting them out of play…this will be no different. This cart path was falling apart, so much so that it is very easy digging. This will be a much nicer way to end a round.
Some years ago I started working with a company in Woburn that manufactured heat shrink tubing to develop a way to renew and protect our stakes, flagsticks, and rakes. The line was developed to match the colors that are popular in golf. This turns out to save money on labor (the process has to be done only every 3 to 5 years instead of painting which has to be done every year) and it cost much less that buying new stakes, sticks, or handles. Redoing a stake would cost under a dollar, while a new stake is $6, for example. For the end user, the golfer, while providing a surface that is easy to keep clean and looking good, when it comes to rake handles there is no chance for fiberglass splinters.
Here are the guys applying the product to hazard stakes:
Below you can see the heat gun in action, shrinking the tubing to the stake.
These first pictures show the condition and some of the repairs. Most notably with the first picture from 2003 you can see the drainage issues, pockmarking in the fairway, the fairway and approach have grown in from the left. Other pictures are of the drainage issue repairs, dredging the stream, landscaped parking area by the tee, right greenside rough improvement, cart path work, and construction of the new forward tee.
Here we are looking at the right side of the tenth green (looking back toward the fairway in the first and last photos). Always a wet area that provided horrible conditions right off the green. The area was stripped, drained, and sodded.
Here are some after pictures with most of the pockmarking on the fairway gone due to the drainage work and fairway topdressing. The fairway has been pushed back out the left so that it lines up with the left hand side of the green rather lining up with the middle of the green as portrayed in the first picture at the top.
My chair asked me to go through this exercise of looking back at pictures to see where we have been, where we are, and what changes we have made for each hole. Even though I lived these changes, I had forgotten how may there were.
Aerial pictures as far back as 1938 indicate that there has always been a structure here. This is actually the old well for the clubhouse that was retired with the clubhouse connection to town water.
Yes, that is the water that used to be supplied to the clubhouse for drinking, cooking, and other. If this was still in use, it would trigger chemical restrictions ont eh course.
Although this looks like it will be an easy lift, it was heavy enough to break the chains.
There is the inside.
We pumped the water out in order to set the new “well” the black pipe. We wanted to keep access to this water for future use such as to fill the 17th pond, or use as a local water source during a drought. When the irrigation pond is empty we will through a pump into any hole we can find that will give us some water.
We filled the entire well with stone, topped off with soil. When spring comes around and the ground thaws, we will grade the entire areas and sod. The turf quality in this area of 18 has always been poor and with the elimination of the cement cover and the re-grading of the area we expect the quality of this area to improve greatly.
As one might see driving down Country Club Road, there is a big project going between the second and fourth holes. This project is part of the approved Master Plan and is part of the Wetland Permit DCPC has with the town of Dedham. While not exactly the same, this project replaces the three bunkers on the fourth hole side that were part of the original design…it is unknown whether Ross designed them or Raynor. The four bunkers added to the second hole side is an addition that was made by our Master Plan architect, Brian Silva and approved by the Master Plan Committee. The picture below is what the area will look like in plan form.
In order to build this bunker complex, we had to generate some soil to work with and do that in accordance to wetland regulations. So, we took the area pictured below of the old pump house which was already a wet area and removed soil from it. We felt that this would improve the drainage on the surrounding fairways and define the wet area around the pump house as an actual water hazard rather than the in between situation that occurred before.
Most of January the project was just at the moving soil stage. We chose to do this while the ground was frozen so that we could minimize the construction damage to the golf course. We are now done moving soil and are just doing some cleanup right now. The fine shaping will start in March as soon as the ground starts to thaw.