News

We have some time limited fantastic offers for golfing families and golfing ladies:-

The work on the undermining issue with the 11th ditch is almost complete and the 10th and 11th holes will be back in play at the weekend.

As mentioned previously, water was undermining the paving flags lining the bottom of the ditch. When we investigated the source of the water we found that it was coming from under the wall as well as from the outlet pipe (plastic pipe put in when the ditch was dug).

We suspected a leak in the plastic piping causing water to re-route under the wall, but digging down to look for it, we discovered the actual problem. When the ditch was originally put in, a second large diameter clay pipe had been dug through and not connected into the wall solid plastic pipe. We therefore had to dig a full trench tracing the clay pipe back towards the 11th green until we could find a suitable place to tee it into the plastic pipe.

We also knew that a drain came out of the 11th green just behind the Sycamore tree. So, whilst we were working in the area, we decided to check if this drain was already connected and, if not, connect it at the same time to help dry the green. It is just as well that we carried out this check as we discovered that it wasn’t connected in but went into a blocked clay drain. To tee-in this green drain we had to lower the plastic pipe by nearly 18 inches to get below the clay drain at this point.

With all the drains joined into the plastic pipe the trench was then back-filled.

To help maintain these drains we built a new chamber where the big clay drain, the plastic pipe, and drain from the green are all meet. This has now has a concrete base with 1 outlet. These drains will be jetted to make sure that they are clear.

Now the new chamber is finished and back-filled we can re open the holes. The base of the chamber is just over 6 feet deep, which is why we didn’t want anyone playing golf near it.

The final part of the job is to re-build the wall at the beginning of the flagged ditch, stone up, replace the concrete edging kerbs and re-flag the ditch. We will close the holes again ONLY whilst working on these jobs.

The work required to sort out this problem was much more than we had anticipated, hence the reason why the holes were closed longer than we would have liked.

One last point:

The back-filled trench is very soft, needs to bed-in, and is not ready for footfall. We are therefore building a temporary crossing point which everyone must use.

Dan.

James Hutchinson, BIGGA Membership Services Manager – Sustainability and Ecology, carried out an ecological and environmental assessment during October 2019 to:
• Assess the ecological and environmental issues relating to Gathurst Golf Club and its surrounding environs
• Provide an in-depth report highlighting any findings that may have arisen from the aforementioned ecological and environmental issues
• Provide an easy to follow plan for the management and greenkeepers thereby improving the flora and fauna quality of Gathurst Golf Club

The report is very comprehensive, take several years to implement, and will benefit both the club out members, and  flora and fauna.

You will find a hole by hole plan with some interesting photographs James took during his visits.

Click here to download your copy: GathurstEnvironmentalReport

For more information about BIGGA (The British and International Golf Greenkeeping Association) visit their webite : BIGGA

If you have any comments about the plan please feel free to talk to Dan or Keith Melia.

The Men’s fixture list for the 2020 season is now complete and the sheet asking for donors is on the notice board. We would like to encourage members to sponsor a competition and donate prizes.

Normally two members will jointly sponsor a competition and provide 2 prizes to the value of around £40 each. These can either be vouchers for the proshop, or gifts (e.g. bottles of wine, dining out vouchers, etc.).

As an incentive and a thank you to those prepared to sponsor a men’s competition, the golf committee have agreed to have a prize during the year that can only be won by those having sponsored a men’s competition.

This will be played for on the last singles competition of the year (4th October). In addition to the normal 1st and 2nd division prizes there will be 2 further prizes for those having been sponsors during the year. The first prize is 20% reduction on 2021 golf fees, the second prize a 15% reduction. These prizes are the largest the club offer, please consider supporting your club through sponsorship.

The 2019 Donor’s Prizes were won by Jimmy Summers (20% reduction off his subscription) and Ian White (15% reduction).

Golf committee

ClubV1 Emails – Going Into Junk

Update in relation to members receiving emails from ClubV1 but being put into Junk.

Recently, several clubs have reported members receiving emails from ClubV1 but they were being put into Junk.

This seemed to be an intermittent issue and appeared to be typically affecting Microsoft accounts; Hotmail.com, Hotmail.co.uk, outlook.com, etc., however some other domains also seemed to be affected, for example gmail, TalkTalk and AOL.

After some investigation by the technical team, we were pointed in the direction of our Dedicated IP address that’s used to send emails. We raised this issue with our deliverability management team at Sparkpost (Email Senders), who then escalated the issue to Microsoft.

We have now been set up with a new dedicated IP, 100% of our email traffic now going through this new IP and our old IP will be deleted in the next week or so.

The route cause of the problem was that our old IP was an Amazon Web Services (AWS) IP,  which Sparkpost are moving away from. Some of the major mailbox providers are flagging AWS IPs, which is why we were getting an intermittent issue.