34 years of rain, huricaines, tornados, etc, have slowly eroded away the greens surrounds on #12. There started to become risk that parts of the green itself would give way and fall into the water following heavy rain. Looking for a solution, we had considered installing rip rap rocks around the green similar to the work done on #4 a few years ago. Unfortunately #12 has very little rough area to work with and we'd be unable to use large scale equipment necessary to install rip rap rocks without destroying much of the green. Looking online, I had fould out about SOX erosion through Linkedin. Its a newer product being heavily used in Florida and slowly coming up the coast coast. Because of the severe weather throughout the U.S, SOX is becoming a staple in the golf maintence industry.
Over a period of 2 weeks, the grounds crew worked with Eastern Shorelines to repair 12 green surrounds and instal SOX.
Before SOX installation, the large boulders surrounding the green needed to be moved away from the bank. Many of the boulders weighed over 4000 lbs. and were difficult to move.
The boulders left large voids on the greens bank that needed to be filled before SOX could be installed. You can see both the grounds crew and the guys from Eastern Shorlines working together to spread out many tons of sand.
After the voids were filled, the bank was staked at multiple spots to create anchoring points for the SOX netting. After installation, the stakes were cut flush with the ground. These stakes will secure the netting for a few years until rotting away.
SOX was rolled out and secured on the bank
Looking at the pic above, you can see the large pile of sand that was stock piled to fill the SOX netting. This sand is the old bunker sand that was saved from the bunker restoration project a few years ago. We hauled the sand to the front of the green dumping piles where SOX was intalled. Eastern Shorelines then used 3 inch trash pumps to wash the sand into the SOX netting to build and fill the new pond bank. Although washing was time consuming, it allowed the sand to pack into the SOX netting, remove any air pockets and shape the bank.
After filling up the SOX netting, all that was left was sod and cleanup. Tuf type tall fescue sod was chosen as it is the same type of rough sod as on the rest of the course. The sod will root into the SOX netting over time. As the root system matures, it will help to secure the bank further. SOX can last up to 100 years and should be a permanent solution to the eroding greens bank. We left a few of the larger rocks in place for asthetics.
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