No washouts on 15!!
The fairways are still pretty wet - although drying out nicely - so I am keeping carts on paths only for the day. I was asked about letting them in the roughs, but this beats the roughs up badly as the carts are prone to slipping on the hills and they also tend to be driven close to the fairways which thins out the rough right next to the fairways leading to bad lies. Since it is starting to dry out, and providing we get no more rain later today, carts should be let back out fully tomorrow - although there may still be a few wet areas roped off to prevent damage.
8&9 all raked and ready for play
The crew finishing up 13
The crew have all the bunkers fixed and raked and the greens were mowed, but not rolled today to protect them as they are a little soft of all the precipitation. Tomorrow, they will be rolled and back to normal. The results from the work earlier in the week on the greens has been great and they are looking a lot better with the dry areas starting to re-wet. The picture below is from our turf sensors in the greens. It is really neat to see the 'flush' happen on the graph. The irrigation was turned on around 8:45pm and you can see that they reached their peak moisture a little after midnight when the hydraulic head caused the flush to happen. The irrigation was shut off around 12:30 am. Once the flush occurred the moisture level tailed off from drainage until the greens were irrigated a little after noon to wash in the wetting agent application. The fluctuations from there is the rainfall over the last few days. It also shows how much the temperatures went down through the profile when the green flushed the cool irrigation water through.
I am looking forward to getting down to Merion this week to see the Open - hopefully one of my countrymen give me something to get really excited about!!!
