My team and I have now been asked a few times “what is with all the holes and digging around the clubhouse and 10^th tee?” Well, one of the club’s and GolfBC’s main goals over the past few years is to become self sufficient with irrigation water. The past two falls we have spent a great deal of effort to expand our reservoir to a capacity that we feel will allow us to irrigate the entire golf course and practice facility without having to utilize municipal water.

Now that the reservoir is complete, we are now onto phase 2 of the project. Our practice facility is currently feed strictly by municipal water and we have no means of getting our water to it. So phase 2 consists of tying our on course irrigation system into the practice facility and then upgrading our Pumphouse to become capable of supplying the water.  The current irrigation mainline ends just behind the 17^th tee. Our plan is to extend it from there, beside the 10^th tee leading around the clubhouse towards the practice facility. With being relatively new to Olympic View, we knew there would be some bedrock we’d had to deal with, but after digging a few test holes, we found it was going to be much more of a problem than originally anticipated. With that, our plan has changed countless times due to our discoveries but we are now set and have our plan. Much of the digging should be completed by the weekend and we’re hoping to get a start on laying some of the pipe early next week. In 2 sections the pipe will actually lay directly on the surface due to the bedrock. With that, we chose to use High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) pipe as it is flexible and doesn’t deteriorate in the sun. As the HDPE pipe is flexible, we therefore needed to build restraints (sleepers) for them to hold the pipe in place. We utilized two different sized steel pipes acting as a sleeve which were buried in cement. One of the largest challenges of this project so far was the length of the pipe! Each pipe was 50 feet long and weighed roughly 200lbs.

Once this is complete, we will move down to the Pumphouse. Our pumps themselves have been well maintained and are in very good shape, allowing them to last another 15-20 years. The control panel and piping, well, that is a different story... They are well past their prime and over the past 2 seasons we’ve experienced small yet inconvenient failures. So with the increased demand on the pumps, a new control panel and piping is necessary to perform the task of watering the practice facility. Work on this is scheduled to start immediately following the completion of the mainline and should be complete by mid-March.