Club Champs 2022

Men’s 2-3 April; Ladies – 5-6 April

Our annual Men’s and Ladies’ Club Championships are both back in April this year and both will feature Medal and Stableford play. We are very pleased that Anne Coesens and Bard’au are back with solid support for the Ladies’ Majors and Neil Mulder has indicated that Sotheby’s will be adding to the Men’s Prize fund! Lynn will be attempting to add to her 20+ Championships from Humewood to St Francis Bay to here. Michael will be trying to make it three in a row.

Fairways and Greens

Charl updates on how he handled the Blight and our over-seeding of fairways and surrounds…

Keeping Str Francis Links in top condition at The Coast is not easy. The drought has only added to the tasks at hand. We are extremely proud of the job Charl and his team are doing.

Pythium blight disease

On 28 January 2022, we had our first outbreak of a disease called Pythium blight on the course. I identified the disease early the Friday morning and immediately sprung into action seeing that this disease spreads quickly if left untreated. By the afternoon we ordered the products after special approval to spend the money and by Monday morning we had all we needed to start spraying our fairways, greens and tees. This fungal disease appears during extremely hot and humid weather conditions and spreads from foot traffic, golf carts and mowers. We finished spraying the course by the end of Tuesday on 1 February and did a follow-up application two weeks later. It seems that we have the disease under control and often do more applications on the greens when we see disease activity early in the morning. We had some turf damage, but we prevented a disaster by acting fast.

Overseeding fairways for the first time since we opened.
When our course opened, we had dark green fairways because of the ryegrass used to sow the fairways and tees. Since opening in 2006, we have never strengthened our fairways by overseeding them with rye seed. This meant that a lot of winter grasses (POA) crept in, and this became the dominant grass on the fairways along with the small patches of Kweek that we are also trying to encourage. Our biggest struggle starts in summer when it takes a lot of effort and manpower to keep the POA looking good because it does not handle the heat very well and this is also the first grass that gets targeted when a turf disease appears. The plan is now to strengthen our fairways again by overseeding with Rye grass at a low rate and to hopefully follow up this program for the next two years to ensure a dense and healthy turf cover.
Below you can see the seeder in action. This Freedo seeder makes a slit and plants the seed at the same time.

 

The seed will germinate amongst the existing turf and will become dark green as it matures, it can take a couple of months to see the results, but it will be well worth it.

Keep it down the middle,
Charl Blaauw and the team

 

The PGA is ON! 3-6 November 2022

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Special Members’ Meeting with the Directors to discuss Estate business – 18 March at 9h30 – very important, please attend!

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The Week’s Results

9 March – Warwick Wealth – Deandre Dreyer and Hein Spangenberg

12 March – IPS – Brett Wilson-Jones

Proud Grandpa of the Week!

 

Download the Zapper app and take a chance!

Thank you all for caring about your course – #leading the way! Adopt a hole (AAH) works.