Hello from the Illinois Valley Country Club!
Well, the Jr. Program began last week and we had about 35 kids show up to what they call “Golf Camp.” The little ones start at 9:00 and the older kids start at 11:00. We had a nice group of volunteers to help the kids learn how to swing, too bad none of our volunteers can swing correctly—just kidding guys! It sure is nice to have these kids catching the “golf bug” at an early age.
Men’s Club Twilight standings this week, top five only this week, full field next week.
1 st Taylor’s Sausage—145.5
2 nd Bogey Nights-130
3 rd True Value-129
4 th Tony’s Trucking-128.5
5 th tie, Waldamar Ranch, Bud Bros-125.5
The Ladies’ Club had a nice group out on Thursday evening. I was working on the pump at the freshwater pond and finished up about the same time as they did and I got to the clubhouse about the same time that the ladies were coming in, they were all chatty and upbeat and fun. They are getting a few more each week and likely will have enough mid-summer to enable us to close the course for them on Thursday evenings.
Speaking of the pump…I had removed the footvalve last week and rebuilt the screen at the bottom of the footvalve. I then was able to make a nice gasket with an old piece of clear rubber freezer curtain that I found in the sausage plant’s warehouse. The pump was priming very easily and being cooperative. Well, waterman Dave called me Sunday morning and told me that he couldn’t get the pump to prime, maybe the shaft stripped was his idea. I went down after taking Mom and Dad to church and turned the priming hose on. I could hear water running down the inlet pipe into the pond but it was not filling. I hooked another hose to a different part of the pipe and still was not filling. I decided that the footvalve got stuck somehow, although I didn’t know how because the screen was fixed pretty well. I had to go to Pottsville to help Tracy sell sausages so I called Scott Kern and he and our new grass specialist took it all apart and found that some seaweed had wrapped itself around the screen and the pump sucked so hard that it collapsed the screen, allowing the seaweed to enter the footvalve housing and stick the footvalve in the open position. My analysis was correct!! We made a new screen and will be putting it all back together this (Monday) afternoon and hopefully it will work.
In other irrigation news- the City came to me last week and informed me of new DEQ regulations. The new rules draw a line 75 feet of a property line or stream in which treated effluent cannot be sprinklered. This has cut the sprinkler outlets by more than half of the locations. We are able to use fresh river water in those locations but, wow, it really restricts our use of the effluent. We are hoping that the city will put in some more pipe and outlets far enough from the setbacks so that we are able to spread all of the effluent for them. Part of the issue is that they cannot put treated, clean effluent into the river during the summer months until Nov 1st so they rely on the course to sprinkler it over the large area, where it gets used for irrigation and removal, a win-win. Otherwise, they have to store it until November, at over 200,000 gallons per day, you can see how much will have to be stored during the summer months. Not only that, but all of the clean effluent that is stored would have to be retreated in order to put it into the river. I asked the operator of the treatment plant how clean the effluent is and he informed me that it has something like less than 10 colonies per ml, which is, in all practical senses, zero. I asked how clean the river water is and he informed that it has something like 10 times that much. It is odd to me that we can water with river water but not with the cleaner, treated effluent…hmmmm.
Anyway, next tournament will be The Greenskeepers Revenge on June 29.
Then the Alumni tournament on July 6th, with a live band, big wedding tents, splash for cash, ribeye steak dinner and the grand opening of the practice putting green—so much fun!