What a Week

Well, it has been a week since we completed the aerification of the greens at Harrison Bay and what a week it has been. 

Last Wednesday, my wife, Melissa, and I escaped for a few days to New York City.  We were able to enjoy a great New York Yankees game which included 5 home runs by the Yankees and 2 by the Texas Rangers and a great throw to home plate by the centerfielder for an out.  We saw an amazing Broadway musical called Wicked, ate at Don Shula's Steakhouse, saw the city at night 69 stories high at Top of the Rock at Rockefeller Center, and spend numerous hours sight seeing all over the city.  It was great to get away and reconnect with my beautiful wife.  I forget sometimes how blessed I am and it is why I always try to tell young people getting in the industry to take time and enjoy their life outside of work.  Jobs come and go,it's what you have outside of the job that really matters.

The greens have made a great recovery from the aerification process and are back to their old selves.  My crew did a great job while I was gone rolling and retopdressing the greens.  We were able to vertical mow and double cut the greens to remove the excess leaf tissue we had generated from the fertilizer applied to speed up the healing process and were able to heal in the holes and return them to a high quality putting surface in just under a week's time.

Some of you may have noticed that the 13th green and #14 tees have been showing signs of drought lately.  We have been experiencing a loss of communication from the computer in the golf course maintenance building and the controller in the field lately which resulted in the irrigation not consistently running at night as scheduled.  Our Toro irrigation field rep came to the course and discovered that with the age of the system and the excessive amount of trees blocking the signal from the maintenance building to the controller location that only around 40% of the signal strength was reaching the controller and sometimes not all of the command was being received, thus the watering cycle would not operate properly.  In order to improve the power of the controller to receive the signal from the computer in the maintenance building we installed some directional antennas on the irrigation controllers for #13 and #14 which will boost the ability of these controllers to pick up the signal being sent out and will hopefully eliminate any missed irrigation cycles on these holes from now on.

Willie Hamby installing the new directional antenna

A quick update on the bald eagles...I was able to watch both juvenile eagles and one of the adult eagles this morning fishing for breakfast at the irrigation lake.  Well, I don't know if you would call it fishing.  The adult caught the fish and the juveniles came and took it from the adult and flew off. Just like a kid. Both of the juvenile eagles seem to be doing well and they are both as large as the adult eagles. I have not been successful in taking any good photos of the juvenile eagles since they blend so well with the trees and they tend to stay back in the tree tops most of the time.   

 

Great Blue Heron
Ardea herodias

The wildlife have been abundant at Harrison Bay lately. Deer, raccoons, turkey, bald eagles, osprey, and this great blue heron are just some of the creatures that call The Bear Trace at Harrison Bay home.