April 28th

Well, since the last posting our golf course now looks like an earth mover show room. Currently we have 3 loaders, 3 large excavators, 2 mini excavators, 4 off road dump trucks, a bobcat, a back-hoe, & 2 dozers. To keep all of the machines running, the contractor is using 400-500 gallons of diesel a day.

How's this for a "Tonka Truck?" Bet your grand kids would like to play around with this one!


Here are two of the smaller trucks waiting to be loaded with clean material to haul from #11 to #9


I took this pic of a bury pit on #12 so you can see how far down the excavator is reaching. The arm of this machine will dig almost 25 feet down and you can see he has it about half way down.


Another angle of the same hole. This entire hole was filled in 1 day with strippings


Here's a pic from the new back tee on #9. Don't worry, I'll move the tree.


The contractor is moving fast on the drainage. Here is a pic of some newly installed bunker drainage.


Part of the whole project is making an "as built" map of where things are. Here is one of the contractor's crew marking drain lines with a GPS unit called a "Trimble." It will be accurate within two feet so we will have a very precise record of where things are.


He also marks where the new drainage basin are being installed.


Here's an example of one of the big challenges with installing the new drainage system. The contractor has to negotiate all of the existing irrigation system stuff. Well, at least he's trying to.


Another challenge is to lower pipes that are now close to the surface once the dozers shape the new contours. Here we are lowering this pipe 10" so that when we aerify, we don't poke it full of holes.


Check this out! Now that's what I call a stump.....


More to come later in the week. Thanks for checking it out.

April 21

Now things are really taking shape; 7, 8 , & 9 are stripped and buried. The contractor is starting to strip the grass off on #11.


Here the contractor is stripping the boundary with the specialty machine to make sure the spoils do not wind up in the neighbor's yard.


Here is a good example of how field changes happen, especially in a renovation. The plans called for a bunker right over top of a 6" mainline (which the contractor nicked with the dozer track & had to be replaced). So we shifted the bunker over 5 yards to the left.


Here is an example of where we moved the irrigation lines instead of the bunkers. The old irrigation lines for 9 green went right through the middle of the new bunkers, see the old bent pipe next to the new bright white pipe(I'm taking the pic from the back of the green's slope). Making a field change here would have too much negative impact on the layout. That's when you change the infrastructure instead of the design.


During the process, its a constant "tweaking" of the design. Myself and the contractor probably don't go more than an hour without talking about what has happened so far that day, what's coming, or the new fire that just popped up. Here we are discussing the 1st bunkers made on 7. I had asked for some changes to the contractor's interpretation of the design. This is the natural process, the shapers have to get a feel for the design's intended shape and look. Remember, they are going from looking at a 2 dimension, flat drawing and now trying to build it 3-D. After 1 or 2 bunkers, very little changes have to be made.




A new world has been discovered at CCN!!! Here the contractor is clearing the old dump for the new blue tee on 13. HOLY HUGE BRAZILIAN PEPPERS BATMAN!!


Here's a look from 13 fairway


Here is a look from the new tee location

End of week 2

Day 10 and moving fast.



Contractor is finishing grades on 7. Here is the new blue tee. Careful, the surface is a little rough.





As the project moves along, I'll make sure to get the best of consultants to give their opinion









Even get them to check the playability before it's too late





Here is the contractor putting the finishing touches on the island between 7 & 9





Everyone keep asking me how's the digging going? The truth is, we are hitting some rocks, but we are not running into a lot of rock. We are able to dig out the rocks and keep going. We are using the rocks for the new rock walls on 16 tees and rip rap on lake banks.





I was also asked the other day how we were going to make the bunkers. The contractor has this excavator with a special "grade-all" buckets that is able to rotate like your wrist, 360 degrees. He is able to manipulate the bucket to shape all the curves of the edges. It takes a lot of skill to work this machine.



Here's something off the wall.....this ain't your Daddy's roto-tiller!



This machine is actually used to reclaim roads. It has some serious bite to it.


The thought being that if we get into some very serious rock, we can use this road reclaimer to pulverize the rock into tiny pebbles as seen on this picture taken on #14 fairway.



Here are just some extra pics taken this week.....

8 right green side looking back to front


8 green complex


I forgot to add this one of the old pump being hauled off for rebuild. New one should be reinstalled next week. When they pulled it out it had an old garbage can from the golf course jammed up inside it.


More rip rap on the island


Well its almost 10 pm on Sat night & I'm sleeping in on Sunday. Call Tony is the golf course goes to pot ;)

April 15

I was looking back through all of the photos I have taken to document all of the stuff that is happening and thought that many of you would get a kick out of the following two pics. The first is a pic of the "Triangle" as I call it (the wetland area that was cleaned out), adjacent to 17 fairway before I had the staff clear out all of the exotics.





and here it is after we took out only the exotics.................................





Its amazing how they choke out everything! In some of the areas in the Triangle, if you were 2 feet away from me and wanted to give me a hundred dollar bill you couldn't. It was that thick!





Well on to the golf course... #7 continues to be the main areas of focus for the dirt moving. This is pic of the new "red" tee. I took this pic in the littoral swale that was cut down behind the tee. If you look real close you can see stakes with red and green ribbons, these are the corners of where the tee will be. Right now all of the teeing grounds are roughed in.





This pic is taken with the camera resting on top of a sprinkler head to represent what existing grade used to be so that you can get a sense of how much fill is being put back to "cap" the course. Remember the grade stakes from before, well some are way up there. Your looking at about 18" of new, clean material to grow the course on.





Speaking of growing the course on clean material, here's a pic of the old bunker sand piled up on the approaches to be used as capping material to make sure they drain really well so that ball will pop up on the green and not plug.





One of the cool things that I got the contractor to do for us is to repair the island between 7 & 9. I had him add some material to the top of the island, raising it almost 2.5 feet, then slope it about 45 degrees down to the water's edge. The plan will be to have the island's old CCN, that you could hardly see, tipped more vertical and done in seasonal flowers so that it can be seen as a prominent feature of the Club. The back side of the island will be planted in bougainvilleas an not trimmed so they put out tremendous color.

April 13th

You wouldn't think that one day would make a difference, but it seems like everyday the new course's pulse gets a little stronger. Here are some pics of what happened since the last posting

Remember the drainage on #10, here's a couple of the new catch basin risers



Work continues to move a long on #7, here's how the shaping will take place. After stripping, the contractor will read the plans and set grade elevations.


Once the elevations are set, then the clean fill dirt is brought in to be shaped to the new grades by the bull dozer.


....and the process proceeds down the fairway



So you go from this...


To this..... notice the difference in the sand piles around the tee area. Its all shaped into soft contours now.


Some other stuff is going on as well. As much of my buildings as possible will be painted a deep green to help make them vanish into the ficus hedge wall on #16.


All over the back 9 fairways test holes have been dug to see how bad the rock is. Initial findings are that the rock is not as bad as originally thought. That means the contractor should be able to move a little faster since they will not have to do as much hauling back and forth between the front and the back. You can see the blue pipe in this test hole. That's the effluent main supply, a 16" pipe. Good thing we found that before the giant excavator did!

Here we go...1st week

We've all seen the before




But few have seen it since we have shut down. Remember all of the lines everywhere? Those lines represented all the "stuff" in the ground that we need to dig up and find. So we dig up what we know and can find and then stake it with a colored ribbon (orange = heads , pink = wires , green = irrigation lines and valves)

Here comes the HEAVY METAL

We have to find all of the stuff so the machines don't find it for us. This picture is where the bull dozer found an irrigation line that was close to the surface.

After the bull dozers clear off all of the organic material, its time to bury it. Here is the first couple of scoops on #7 fairway. The material generated out of the pit has been very clean, which means we should have a good sandy base for the course.

Here's what the pits look like after they have been dug out! You can see the difference in the color of the materials in the pit. The dark stuff is the old grass and organics from the tops of the fairways. These pits are approximately 15 feet deep.

Mean while, on the back side the contractor started preping to install the first of the drainage. This main line is between 10 & 13





Here is the pipe being layed from the lake behind 10 green going towards 13 green




Here is pic of where the new blue tee on #7 will be. Looks a lot longer of a shot than it really is. The contractor has reshaped the lake banks making the lake larger in certain spots.

Someone asked me the other day how we were going to know where the green's perimeters are when everything is dirt. Each green has a drain clean out and and wire that has been buried in the green's well that can be traced and marked. Here is a pic of the clean out stub up. It also shows the barrier that was installed to keep the native soil from wicking out moisture from the green's mix.

Here is pic of the actual wire. Notice the wicking barrier.

Here's Keith hooking up the tracking device so he can mark the actual perimeter of the green for the contractor

That's it in a nut shell. The first week has been exciting and fun. Stay tuned for more updates.