River/Irrigation
Our channel at the river pretty much dried up in September and we had to be very judicious with the irrigation. Luckily, we had a nice rain at the beginning of the month that carried us for a bit but that was short lived with the sunny weather for the rest of the month. I was running on empty so fortunately some investigating into our water license by another individual from the board of directors revealed we had the option to divert the river. Great news that somewhat pissed me off because in all my dealing with the ministry that was never mentioned as an option. I learned not only to ask for help but also never assume the government is telling you everything. End result was from this:
to this:
The only problem was by the time we had the flow to pumps we ran out of time to pull from the river so we never completely re-charged the reservoir. Hopefully the river stays the same for spring and we will still have the flow at our intake to fill the reservoir and meet our spring irrigation demands. At present, it appears low water flow is less of an issue for us but we still have the problem of pumping dirty water during spring run off which wears out our pumps and costs us thousands of dollars. I still believe we need to connect to the city water line to address this issue but the potential cost is forestalling the inevitable. We'll look into other options over the winter and hopefully we'll have a plan in place before I start up the pumps next spring.
Equipment
We managed to make it through another year and only had to add one utility vehicle and one triplex mower to our junk/obsolete pile at the shop. Again, by the end of the season I had pretty much had it and did a "dog and pony" show in an attempt, one more time, to demonstrate how dire our situation is. I've always assumed people knew how beat up and old the equipment was since dilapidated pieces seemed to have been randomly plunked all over the course throughout the years in various states of disrepair but I think because they were always pieced back together and made operational people don't really appreciate our situation. As always, quantifying a situation helps. Saying a mower has 4000 hours means very little to most individuals but if you equate hours to miles people may begin to understand what "old" means golf course mower wise. A reference I found (GO HERE) equates 500 hours on a mower to 125 000 miles (that's 240 000 km!) on a car so 4000 hours is similar to 1 000 000 car miles. All of our equipment has more than 1500 hours and a majority has greater than 2500 hours with some pushing 6000 hours. Even if you cut this estimate in half our machines are old. Luckily, the club had a somewhat OK year so we've updated our old stuff with some used stuff.....
it's a start.
Finally, some pictures worth viewing. The first one is of a pot located near the bag drop area. Someone put a smoldering cigarette in the pot and when I showed up in the morning the pot had completely melted away and the wooden step next to the pot had burnt. Take home message is to look for an ash tray instead of the closest receptacle to litter with your cigarette butt.
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| Click Picture |
I found this robin staring at his shadow just outside the golf shop one morning. There was a large collection of birds gorging on the mountain ash berries on 4 tee and folk lore has birds getting drunk if they eat too much (go HERE) so perhaps this bird was a little funked up. I put him on Sam's Bench to ride the buzz out and he either eventually flew away or ...?
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| Hammered? |
