Turf
04 MAY 2023
We are in the final stretch before the opening of the courses. Our two maintenance teams have gone through the challenging job of uncovering our greens from their winter protection. We discovered some nice surprises underneath. No ice injuries and healthy turf. A few mice had decided to take up residence for the winter under the tarps, but despite their best efforts they only made minimal damage that will be fixed quickly. Winter brings its share of surprises; we do what we can to get ready and then wait to see the results when spring comes. We are very happy to find the surfaces where we left them in the fall when we closed.
With less winter damage we will be able to move forward and focus on improving the courses. The workload is still immense as we want to keep improving the courses and build on our efforts from last season. Nothing is won, time to roll our sleeves up and continue this spring momentum to offer you the best possible course conditions results.
Speaking of results, the drainage work that was done last year on holes N0. 9-11-18 has paid off. The surfaces of these three fairways were amongst the more challenging drainage surfaces at Le Maitre. The firm fairways left after the melting of the snow in a short period of time mixed with some heavy downpours demonstrated the effectiveness of this system. In fact, even if the winter did not bring us much ice, I believe that we would have had some damage in these areas should this work had not been done. With this drainage system, we will now be able to successfully improve the quality of these fairway playing surfaces. NMP Golf Construction, who did the work last year, will continue the drainage improvement project on holes N0.3-5-8. The work should begin towards the end of June. We will let you know when the schedule becomes official.
In combination of this work, we will again be able to repair, modify or eliminate problematic sand traps. We do not remove bunkers at random, a classification process was done for each bunker as we look to improve the overall sand trap inventory at Le Maitre. In addition, we will look at adding some advanced tee boxes to make some holes more enjoyable for golfers of all abilities. We will be providing more details on these projects in future communications.
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Diable river under high surveillance
We are monitoring the level of the Diable river every day. With the melting of the snow and the heavy rains of the last few days, several golf holes are flooded on both courses. We are seeing a slight decrease in water levels but still not enough to be able to start pumping on hole 16. With the good weather that seems to be settling in, we will soon be able to have access to the entire course to prepare it for the opening. Usually, the annual average water flow of the river is 27.37 m3 / second, beyond the threshold of 100 m3/second, the courses start to flood. We have reached 210 m3/second this year.
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Future work:
- Pressurize the irrigation systems
- Pump the water off hole 16
- Cleaning of the property (branches, debris, etc.);
- Vertical mowing on the greens;
- Bridge repairs at the Le Maître.
Marc-André Doré
Superintendent