GOLF COURSES
Kinderlou Forest reduces workload with Capillary Bunkers
Georgia semi-private course instals liner system to beat washouts
he Kinderlou Forest course
T in south Georgia is in the middle of a project to instal the Capillary Bunkers liner system in a quest to make better use of its course maintenance labour resource .
Designed by the firm of Love Golf Design , run by PGA Tour legend Davis Love III , and opened in 2004 , Kinderlou Forest is a semi-private course . Part of a substantial real estate development , the course has 250 members , about half of whom live on the property , and is also open to the public . The course played host to the Web . com Tour every year from 2008-2016 , and is the venue for the Korn Ferry Tour ’ s qualifying school this year .
“ The bunkers were originally designed to have flat bottoms with turf rolling down the sides ,” explains superintendent Heath Allen . “ But the course is about eighteen years old , and the bunkers had not been touched in that time , so we have started to see a lot of erosion when we have a big rain event .” The course has a total of 84 bunkers , the majority of which are found on the more open front nine – the tree-lined back nine has fewer , bigger bunkers .
Allen has been at the course for sixteen of its eighteen years . “ In the last five to eight years , we ’ ve noticed a lot of washouts and erosion . The first few years I was here , we ’ d have big rains and minimal impacts , but recently , it has got a lot worse ,” he says . “ We were spending more labour on bunkers than on any other part of the golf course – even greens . That didn ’ t seem right to me .”
Allen started looking around at bunker liner products . “ I saw the Capillary Bunkers system at the GCSAA show in 2020 , and I was very impressed ,” he explains . “ The biggest issue is that we maintain our bunkers using machines . I felt that if we used a fabric liner , and it snagged on the machines , we were going to spend a lot of time and money repairing it . We want to do this one time
and not have to worry about going back in to replace anything . And the Capillary sytem is very easy to install – there are very few restrictions about suitable weather , or time of day , and so on .”
Georgia-based contractor Pristine Golf started work on the project in July . “ We ran into a few issues getting
6 GroundskeepingJournal . co . uk | November 2022