2012 Course Aeration Progress

In our previous update I mentioned a change of plans and alteration of our aeration schedule due to forcasted wet weather for aeration week. At the time we altered our plans, the weather forecast was calling for a 40% chance of showers for yesterday in which we had back nine greens scheduled for aeration. We decided to aerate all regulation greens on Tuesday ahead of the forecasted showers to stay on schedule. As we all know  weather forecasts change but we still decided to stick to our altered plan and get the greens out of the way on Tuesday ahead of what was inevitably .30" rain that night.

#12 fairway with removed cores on the surface drying
in the sun.

The Granite Bay Golf Club's weather station has recorded .80" of precipitation since last Saturday making the course a little wetter then ideal for the process, particularly in the fairways. However there is allot of scheduling, equipment and man-power go into this process and with newly negotiated additional alternating closures we are aware of the burden this places on the golfing membership. We desperately want to get the job done properly and in a timely fashion so with clear weather yesterday  we decided to keep the back nine closed and proceed as planned with fairways. 

Once these cores are dried we process them with this machine
called a core processor. After this we drag the fairway with
a large drag mat then blow and vacuum up the remnants. 

So by the end of Wednesday evening we were able to complete all putting surfaces and fairways #10 through #16. Ground conditions were a little on the wet side and we had the normal amount of equipment malfunctions but we were able to muddle through and get this far actually putting us ahead of schedule. So our plan is now to get through fairways #1 through #6 today with the front nine closed, stay on schedule and close the back nine tomorrow and finish fairways #17 & #18. Additionally we will start green surrounds on the back nine tomorrow targeting #'s 10,11,12,15 & #13. Fortunately for GCM we have no scheduled events this coming Monday giving us the opportunity to finish front nine fairways #8 & #9 and to get started on surrounds on the front side as well. All of this will allow us to forgo the planned front nine  / back nine closures we had planned for April 17th & 18th as GCM will have a few surrounds to finish next week which we can do properly by utilizing front nine and back nine starts.