Newsletter September 2018

Dear Members,

Well we are slowly approaching the end of a long and very memorable golfing season, 2018 has been an incredible year for Simon’s Golf Club, in late May early June we held the European Senior Tour event the Shipco Masters, to celebrate 25 wonderful years of Golf and club development at Simon’s. We received nothing but rave reviews for the condition and set up of our course, from all the Pro’s and guest’s who attended the event.

Mother Nature it would seem is ensuring that we are all kept busy trying to adjust in an ever changing weather climate. Last season we broke many records for the heavy rainfall amounts which we received and the least number of summer days’s since records began. This year we have smashed all records for minimal rainfall amounts, record high temperatures and the highest number of collective summer days.

Our course again coped fantastically; yes our fairways went very brown however by managing our allocated water amounts carefully we managed to keep our tees, greens and greens complexes in fantastic condition all season long. Over the past two weeks we have large amounts of rainfall and our fairways have recovered extremely quickly, however much of this rainfall came down very heavily, thankfully our bunkers coped very well. Yes they held water but with the two powerful pumps we purchased last season this water was quickly removed and the bunkers made playable ahead of your round.

Now we must focus our efforts on preparing our course for what I hope will be another long and active winter season.

This week finds late season aeration successfully completed. The usual application of a high iron based fertiliser was also applied to the tees and fore greens, this helps to speed up recovery and also to start to prepare the areas for the off season.

We will be addressing the points below during the weeks ahead:

• As the leaves start to fall we will continually remove them from in play areas.

With the weather getting colder and daylight hours getting shorter, the months ahead will see the speed of grass growth decrease considerably and all areas will be mown less frequently and at a higher height of cut, this is to help protect the grass plant over winter.  I will re-publish our annual “Off Season” Newsletter in the coming weeks, reminding members of the steps we will take to help protect our course through the off season.

As we all know during late September, October and November we can expect there to quite a difference between the day and night time temperatures. So we can expect to start to experience mornings where we have fog and frost delays. With regard fog delays and safety, the obvious rule of common sense must apply, if you cannot clearly see where your ball will land, do not start or do not continue your round until such a time as you can do.

As our members and visitors are very privileged to play the course year round including regulation greens, we have strict rules which apply to the situation of frost and snow; therefore the following information concerning frost is extremely important!

When the course is closed due to frost, so are all grassed areas!

Frost does not damage grass, it is traffic on frozen grass which does!!

In previous years when conditions have favoured it, members have been greeted by a frost delay even though the air temperature has recorded temperatures above 0 degrees Celsius I have witnessed this many times throughout my career and indeed at Simon’s, if the night is calm, the sky is clear and the dew point is high, even when the air temperature is recording temps as high as 5 degrees Celsius the course has been frozen. For a detailed explanation please see the link below.

http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/whys/frost.htm

When there is a delay to the course opening a “Course Closed” will be placed in the starter house, this will only be removed by a member of the A/S staff once the risk of possible damage to the course has passed.

I ask all members and guest’s to always be patient and polite to our staff, especially whilst waiting for the course to open. I, as in previous years, will work closely with the pro shop to help provide information on blocking the earliest tee times in golf box when frost is forecast.

Kind regards
Reamonn

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