First some pictures from our trip to Indy. First time at Lucas Oil, but we spent many of times driving by on our way to visit family in Indiana or when we would come back from World Percussion Championships in Dayton. The dream of the boy and us was he would be marching with a Drum Corp in Lucas. We had attended a couple of audition camps through the years, but not this past one. He did do winter percussion this past winter, but didn't try out for DCI. I think the trip was a little bittersweet as he saw people he had auditioned with in the past, and with his making a winter percussion group this past season, it was probably his best chance to march in the summer, alas this was his age out year, the last year he could have marched. The second picture is him checking out the field for the first time, the third is a picture of my favorite corps, Casper Troopers, one of the ones he had auditioned for. His favorite is Santa Clara Vanguard (mine too back in the days of the late 70's when we watched on PBS), this year's champion. I think it's important to spend some family time together, especially before he headed back to school, I think getting away from the course for a few days refreshed me as well.
We did hit some rain before we arrived home, where it had really poured. There was some wind as well, but we weren't sure of the extent, until later that evening.
After we had arrived home, I knew I had to go back to the course, because the forecast when we had left that previous Wednesday had not called for the rain we had received, and the irrigation computer was set to run. Upon arriving at the course, I shut the computer off, and went out to turn off three controllers that are not communicating with the computer. At that time I saw we had received 2.5" of rain, and did see some debris down, but it was dark by that time.
The next morning we were greeted with branches and debris everywhere. With the greens full of leaves, we concentrated first on clearing them and tees with blowers and picking up the loose branches. The rain had come down so fast the night before, and we had been so dry, it was possible to allow carts and golfers to play, and with the nice cooler weather they did.
With greens cleared on day one, the next day we mowed greens and collars and approaches. With just two of us in that day, we continued with picking up smaller branches and debris and blowing off fairways. On Monday, which was another day we were short handed and had two of us in, we concentrated on mowing fairways and greens again, spraying greens, picking up branches and blowing debris further into the rough.
Tuesday and Wednesday when we had the most staff members in, we were able to set the course up for play and the crew really attacked the larger items needing removed by chainsaws. Above are some of the small trees and larger branches or tree leaders that had broke. Below was our nicest Ginkgo tree where the top had blow out of it. Of all of our Ginkgo's, Murphy's Law I guess dictated the nicest one to be damaged. I didn't even realize it was a Ginkgo, it was such a big and nice tree. Our park's tree crew did say that it will live for short time until it starts rotting out from the missing top. It might give us some time to get a new tree in it's place before we have to remove it all together.
We were able to finally repair and rake our bunkers on Thursday, all in all the crew did a nice job, and our customers didn't have any complaints about course conditions during the clean-up. I attribute that to the prioritizing of cleanup and regular maintenance returning to greens and tees first, then fairways. Also to the crew's constant work, the golfers seemed to appreciate their efforts.
The next step will be the tree crew coming and removing some of the hangers in the Sycamores up where we can't reach them, assessing the health of the trees remaining, and looking at getting replacement trees in place for trees we lost or will loose in the future.
As always,
Thanks for reading!
Mel
