A happy St Andrews Day to everyone from us all in St Andrews. If I remember correctly this time last year we were in the depths of winter with several inches of snow lying across the courses. This year sees a much milder spell of weather at the moment, so long may it continue.
The mild weather has allowed to crack on with our winter programme, which is progressing well. Shell bunker is still ongoing and we actually stopped work in there for a couple of weeks to allow the turf on the bunker wall to settle. With this being such a large build and a considerable amount of weight of turf in the wall we build in several stages to allow for natural settlement, so we don’t envisage completing this job until after Christmas.
We have continued to re-build other bunkers and at moment we are working on Wig bunker which guards the left handside of the 16th green.
On top of all that work we are planning very soon to re-level the 12th medal tee which has slightly sunk to the right handside but forecast this to be completed within a few days.
During the close season I am changing all my green sprinklers to a different specification to allow me more flexibility and further reduce my water usage, the new model of sprinkler being installed will allow me to reduce arcs on site very simply when needed. Another irrigation related job which will be happening in the next few weeks will be the changing of all sprinkler heads on fairways with new lids with a much better yardage reading which will be more visible to the golfer than what we have at moment.
Finally, our fairway plugging programme is going well and the team have plugged a considerable amount this year, a big thanks to all the team for their efforts over the last couple of months.
Enjoy your St Andrews Day!