Monday Work--Bunker Duty

Each Monday, Bernardo Heights CC is closed to play and the maintenance staff is freed up to concentrate on projects and disruptive cultural practices.  Put another way, we can tear things up and not worry about play.  I enjoy the membership and want to see the course packed on every other day, but there's nothing like a closed Monday.  We accomplish a week's worth of work in one day and supply this blog with a week's worth of posts.  The next five days I will highlight the efforts of the crew on Monday, November 5th.

One of our many tasks at hand on this Monday was the re-shaping of a couple of bunkers that had become rather unplayable.  The first and worst was a bunker on #8 that sits on the right side of the fairway about 50 yards from the green.  A ball could land near the center, high on the lip, and roll back to the front edge of the bunker.  The only choice a player has is to punch out to the fairway.

The center lobe, part of a design that must have been a staple in Ted Robinson courses, has encroached over ten feet into the bunker.  When you have this much bunker to reclaim, digging with a shovel is going to take awhile.  We do not have a back hoe, so we tried the front end loader and saved a bunch of time.

(I have a video of the work with the tractor, but after three attempts, it's not working out.)

Under the grass we removed was ample sand to be returned to play.  We used a rototiller to fluff it up and raked it thoroughly to remove any grass parts that were left over.  We also attended to a fairway bunker on #5 and will look at a fairway bunker on #13 in the near future.