However there are a few areas on the course where the existing natural contours need some help shedding excess water. We went to work on remedying two such areas today. The first was near the ninth tee box in the valley between the tee and the fairway. Unfortunately the water tends to pool there as there is no way for it to run off into the pond.
Our first job was to dig a trench so we could get the standing water flowing towards the pond. Once we got the water drained we began the process of laying in drainage pipe which will mitigate some of the problem in the future. After running into a few small problems with buried rocks and an irrigation pipe we laid in the new drain pipe.
We're going to let the remaining water continue to drain out of the area giving us a chance to see if there are any other areas that may need addressing before we completely cover the area and fill in some of the low spots in a few days.
We then moved on to a much more ambitious project near the ninth green. The area running from the small pond down past the bunker has always been a very troublesome area because it holds water making it difficult to mow and a very wet experience for people whose balls wind up right of the green on nine. So we decided to take action to address this issue. The first thing we did was to trench out the fairway under the bunker to allow the water to drain into the smaller stream. We laid a section of perforated pipe in which will continue to collect the runoff from the fairway.
We then moved up to the small pond and ran 120 feet of a combination of perforated and solid pipe from the small pond all the way down the old drainage ditch which will help tremendously in our efforts to capture more rainwater for our larger irrigation pond.
With the addition of an overflow valve and a dam there will be no other way for the water to exit the small pond other then down the pipe we have installed. Currently the smaller pond captures all the runoff from our parking lot and a lot of water is wasted on its journey from the parking lot down to the irrigation pond. We're hopeful that with these new modifications we will have a much larger source of water to draw on during the summer months.
Below is a photo of everything tied together near the bunker. Again we're going to let everything drain out in the next few days while looking for any problems before filling everything in and re-seeding the area.
So the next time it rains and you don't want to get your feet wet, come out and play Brunswick Greens!!!
-Andrew
