Just got back in from the site, it took me 12 hours to get home and had a great asado and good wine last night before I left.
Daryl will get a repsonse out to you now.
RJ
A small resovior would be great but not nescessary, there are several streams that are snow melt runoff and streams formed from the high quantiy of rain. There are three good ones that have more than enough water year around, one we canīt touch that runs between the two nines because it is dedicated for other uses further down stream. the back nine has one that will be easy to manipulate and create what we need. Front nine under investigation. All you really need to do is create a small pool five feet by five feet, in the middle of the stream and put a drain in the low point for your irrigation feed. If this is eighty or ninety meters above the course you will create constant 110 psi pressure on the system. You start to irrigate and the stream keeps the pool full and you water with 110 psi. Put an automatic electric filtering system just before the water gets to the golf course and you keep it clean, automatically. I will verify the numbers this weekend and the altitude needed but I know itīs around ninety meters. One of the two nineīs at Santa Martina is watered this way, the only difference is we have wells that pump to a small pond of about 4-6 million gallons, enough for two or three days of watering without the wells.
To Ben and all,
Our average course construction budgets over the last sixteen years has been somewhere between two and two and half million dollars. I have done two courses that went over the four million mark, this is my first hopefully repeat client and the first course I did for them cost 4,5 million and opens May 19, but there was a contractor involved. I had a four hours layover in Ba, where there headquaters are and so I went and had an hour meeting with them this afternoon and discussed my findings and recomendations. I told them my intial estimates are that we can create something of quality for somewhere between one and one point five million but that I want the weekend to verify these number. They were shocked and a little skeptical and I felt that they felt that I am telling them what they want to hear and in the long run itīs gonna cost another 4.5 million dollars.
If I can eliminate pump station, put in a single row irrigation system, that starts one yards in front of the back tee, small head on the tees, put double row- four heads in the landing areas and good coeverage on the greens and around the greens, will be a big reduction in comparrison to the typical wall to wall. Push up greens with the good native soil that is on site, an average of half meter throughout the proejct. No $600,000 USGA greens. So I think a qualified shaper can do nine holes in three to four months, scrape five or six inches around the green complexes to generate the soil to elevate them like the good ole days and significant movement for rapid surface draiange. Fix some surface drainage problems more than shaping in other areas. No mounding for framing, that will be accomplished with the native dense shrub type vegatation at an average of nine feet in height. If you add mounds, it will be out of place and difficult to tie back into the terrain below the existing vegatation. No lakes, the first course I did for them has at least ten big lakes, maybe more. Maximum of fifteen sand bunkers per nine and maybe less. Under the topsoil is gravel mix with clay but seem to be permeable and I think french drains will work. I want to test the perc rates but in the worst case there are gravel beds all over and you could dig out the gravel and clay and repalce with pure gravel and you have your bunker and depression drainage...cheap. Wall to wall fescue, seed should not run more than 30,000 dollars. The soil remains wet eight months of the years so establishing non irrigated areas should be easy. Itīs dry in the summer but still rains every couple of weeks that should allow the non irrigated areas to remain alive. In one of our projects, the wells dried up and the grass died but after three months without water the fescue came back once we started watering again. I need to get a better grip on clearing cost, most of it is dense and nine feet. They will allow burning though during five months of winter, which means no trucks. I want to use retroīs for root removal and a D-5 for shaping and hopefully protect the structure of the native topsoil. Sand would be stockpiled in the rough and added to bunkers with small gators for example. No cart paths. So the only big numbers are a reduced efficient irrigation system and of course my feeīs
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