Our spring preparations are now well underway and this year we’re replacing all the sand in our greenside bunkers on Church and Mill. We need to do this because the sand in place gets contaminated over time, becomes more moisture retentive and therefore overly firm in the bases, and finally the depth in both faces and bases must be reset for the season ahead. The playability of modern-day bunkers is of concern too regarding the dreaded “plugged lie” thanks to high faces, bunker liners that dry sand quickly, and climate change’s induced long periods without rain. We are focussing on combating this situation modestly at first with a sand change and what we hope to be the silver bullet, full solution of trialling a new product designed to stop them altogether. Oh it must be nice to be an old heathland course with very shallow faces, heavily contaminated hard sand, and lots of shade to stop evaporation!
Replacing bunker sand en masse is a tough job with the sand requiring physical removal by shovels – some three-hundred tonnes in total – the porous tarmac liners exposed and cleaned, before the new sand is added. We use the USGA and RTJ design sand depth parameters of two inch depth in the face and four inch depth in the base. As the new sand is free from contamination and loose, it needs time to settle in before becoming firm again. We speed this process up as best we can by using watering and “whacker plates” to vibrate and compact the sand. Until it has fully settled, it will play softer than usual with “plugged” and/or “fried egg lies” more commonplace. A short-term problem though and the fresh sand will perform and play far better than the old; provided adequate moisture is present. We expect to complete all bunkers by early April and will do our best not to disturb your round too much in the meantime.
I want to finish off by telling you about a trial we’re undertaking this year, testing a product called bunker-armour (www.bunkerarmour.com). This is a polymer-based, fibre and wax additive that’s mixed with our bunker sand and installed on the faces. It sets relatively hard and is designed to eliminate plugged lies. We’ve chosen all four greenside bunkers on Church four to trial it and it’ll be installed in the Church maintenance week starting 27th February. We’ll clear the sand out of those four bunkers WC 20th February and they’ll be marked GUR until the installation work is finished.
Please do let us know how you find the Bunker Armor from a playability perspective. If successful, we plan to add it to all greenside bunkers from 2024 onwards. Exciting stuff and we hope it provides the answer for our plugged lie problems successfully seeing-off the factors that cause them of high, exposed, flashing face bunker designs!
The daffodils are up, spring is on the way, but winter may have a sting in it’s tale yet!
John Lockyer
Director of Greens