This past fall, a lot of time was spent making minor improvements to increase the efficiency of our fairway drainage systems. Major improvements were previously made during the course renovation, but the heavy rains this past fall pointed out a number of areas that need continued improvement. Unfortunately a handful of those areas will take resources and shaping skills that we cannot provide in house and, for those, a master plan will be developed. Each area will be prioritized and fixed when time and resources allow. As for the smaller, more manageable areas, we are able to address those ourselves and we already made good strides this past fall.
The areas we focused on the last few months were areas that didn't surface drain as fast as we needed. This was due to a number of issues. Some areas didn't have adequate fall and the velocity of the draining water wasn't high enough to remove it from the playing surface fast enough. In other areas, the water simply had too much ground to cover before reaching a basin.
We went about fixing the insufficient slope issues in one of two ways. We either increased the percent slope along the entire run of the waterway through grading or by lowering the basin itself. These promoted higher water velocities along the run of the drainway and entering the basins.
The areas that simply relied on surface drainage for too long of a stretch were fixed by grading in and installing small inlets throughout the entire run of the waterway.
Below are photos of some work we did on Gray Hawk #1
Below are photos of some work we did on 1 Black Bird
