| After the Irish announcement some while ago about re-starting golf on May 18th, I wasn’t really expecting us to beat them to it! But hey-ho, here we are, and our two staff currently working, Tom and Ali, will do everything they can to get things ready for tomorrow.
Please don’t expect too much as this is our 6th week of working with only two of the lads and keeping to the guidelines about essential maintenance only. We’ve been leaving the greens quite long but have still been having to water them regularly – what irony after the winter we had – and we’ll be taking them down to 5mm today in readiness for your return.
As we’re being very mindful of costs, they haven’t been fed much or top-dressed either, so they won’t be in the condition of the last few summers. That said I’m hoping that you’ll just be happy to be out there again.
With golfers back on the course, we’ll be moving up to three greenkeepers from next week (at the end of the current furlough period) and Ali will take a well-deserved rest for three weeks. I’ve a feeling you may just see him with clubs in hand – and Rob this week for that matter.
Apart from the extra tasks of moving pins and tee markers, seeding tees and the occasional raking of bunkers, the fact that we’re back on the course will slow them down too. Please do what you can to help them get through their work, and I appreciate the decision of the Management Committee to give them until 8.00am before we interfere!
I’ve been assigned marshaling duties this week by our own Captain Tom – you’ve a thing or two to learn about fundraising though Tom – so I hope to see many of you at BG, naturally at a respectable distance.
I do hope you enjoy playing some golf again, and, providing we all do as we’re asked, that we might look forward to further progressive steps to ‘normality’.
And finally I hope that you’ll notice the slow but steady improvements that Rob and his team will be making to the course.
Stuart Thomson
Chair of Green |
