...which hopefully won't turn into Sh*tty Saturday. The pineapple express is at it again and as usual it's created some headaches. The mild temperatures during the day and night combined with the rain have pretty much saturated the snow covering the course. Since none of the green surfaces are thawed (I had to dig a valve up last week and needed a pick ax to break the top 6" of soil before I got past the frost) the slow trickle of water through the snow is starting to freeze on the surface.
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| "Pebbly" Looking Green Surface |
A quick survey yesterday of all the greens (except 13; I haven't been there yet) revealed all the greens have a similar type of appearance. Basically, the somewhat loose surface granules have started to coalesce into a entity with more substance (sort of tap dancing around saying it, aren't I?). The new putting green has got this going on:
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| Dreaded Clear Ice |
Now what? I suspect that there is very little buffering capacity left in the snow cover and we won't be able to ride out another bout of wet weather like we just had without making things worse; however, I also suspect that since most greens surfaces appear similar to the first picture and not the second we may not be that bad off. To back up this suspicion with more than just my "spidey sense" I decided to experiment a bit.
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| The '' Ol' Wishy Washy Split Plough on #9 Green |
Why only half? This way I can be right and wrong no matter what happens in the spring! But truthfully (assuming things don't get any worse ice wise) I'm not sure the surface has enough ice cover to be overly damaging. I do know that it is not uncommon for dense ice to develop when you plough wet snow and the surface doesn't completely clear off but luckily for us by the end of the day the pebbly ice looked like this:
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| Crumbly Ice with Air Gap |
This layer sort of comes off with a bit of work but I'm going to leave it one more day and see what happens. And finally...
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Yea, That's Ice
I removed all the snow from the new putting green and by the end of the day not a whole lot had melted. Let's call it day 1 of ice cover on that girl. Again, we'll see what tomorrow brings but that one might be funky in the spring, just saying....
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