Two weekends ago I started to realize, despite keeping the courses dry and irrigating only as needed, that we were on a fast track to running out of water if we continued to have warm, dry, windy conditions and didn't receive any precipitation. By Monday the 15th, it became clear we were running low and I texted my brother ( who is also a Superintendent ) asking if he had any rain I could borrow.
Well. He didn't. We didn't receive any precipitation either. We were able to irrigate lightly Monday night without any issues but things were dire at that point. I contacted my Regional Agronomist and we decided not to run any irrigation Tuesday. We wanted to be sure we wouldn't run ourselves totally out. We wanted to save some at the bottom of the barrel to use on greens if things didn't improve.
Wednesday the 17th we had a diver come out and clean around the pump intakes in the lake. He also measured how much water we had from the top of the intakes to lake level. Based on what we saw we decided to try to run some water on fairways and tees Wednesday into Thursday. However, it didn't happen. We tried to draw too much water too quickly and the pumps shut down. We still had some water but not enough to match the demand of the pumps.
From that point on we only were running greens and green surrounds. So the fairways, tees, and approaches had not received any irrigation from Monday the 15th to Monday the 22nd.
I wanted things dry, but maybe not that dry.
Our issues are many. Lots of acres. Open course that the wind really blows over. A pond that is on the small side for the acreage. But the major issue stems back to the removal of the low head dams on the Millstone River. The removal of those dams has rendered our river transfer pump useless 80% or more of the time. The river runs so low now that we need a significant rainfall to pump without fear of running our transfer pump dry. We can't pump enough into the pond to keep up with what we are using. And we go long periods without being able to pump anything.
We are milking things along the best we can. I think we have the moisture replenished in the tees ( maybe too wet on some ) and green surrounds, but on the fairways and approaches we just haven't been able to keep up.
The good news is they are forecasting rain for this evening and especially tomorrow. What could go wrong?
