The grounds crew spent most of the week moving the large boulders from the front of 12 green to get ready for SOX erosion control installation the following week. I was hopeful that our front end loader with a lift capacity of 3960 pounds would be ablle to dig out and pick up the rocks. I was wrong. The loader struggled to even move the boulders, when we tried to the backhoe, the machine started pulling itself into the water instead of lifting the stones. We had thought about renting a larger, more powerful machine like a trackhoe but had very little room between the green and waters edge.
Our next idea was to rent a jack hammer and break the rocks into smaller pieces. Wrong again. You can see me below giving it a try but the hammer was unable to make a dent. We also tried using a chop saw to cut the rocks but that didn't work either.
The rocks only needed to be moved 8 foot off of the pond bank. After thinking awile we decided to give the truck with tow straps a try. By strapping the rocks, and pulling with our pickup truck. We were finally able to get the boulders to budge. Once we came up with a game plan, we were able to pull all 54 rocks off of the bank and into the water.
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You can see one of the boulders being pulled out to sea in the link below
https://youtube.com/shorts/S4izRLnpLRA