The Collie Golf Club will be putting their new lawn mowers to good use ahead of this weekend’s annual Riverside Open tournament.
Collie Golf Club course superintendent Doug Bayley said the club had taken ownership of the two mowers over the last week or so and he could already see the difference on the course.
“The cut on [the new mower] is perfect to say the least,” he said.
“It’ll be great for the health of the turf. The old mowers were so blunt, so to speak, that it just tore the grass up.
“This new one just cuts it perfectly.”
Mr Bayley said the new mowers would result in some of the best fairways seen at the course for the Riverside Open, which he had already been preparing for the last two weeks.
“Usually we only mow once a week,” he said.
“But for the Riverside Open, we have been mowing every day for two weeks.”
Mr Bayley said getting the course in the best condition for the more than 150 golfers expected to take part in the tournament was a team effort.
He said he had a lot of help from volunteers, staff and the club’s match committee to get the course ready.
Mr Bayley said the new mowers, one of which had to be flown in from the United Kingdom, would provide other benefits to the club outside of beautiful fairways.
“Our plant maintenance costs were through the roof last year,” he said.
“We worked it out that the yearly repayments on the new mowers would be cheaper than trying to maintain the ones we had, which were already eight to 10 years old.
“[Replacing them] probably should have been done a couple of years ago.”
Mr Bayley said the club had taken out a five-year lease when purchasing the mowers and with the staff at the club, he expected they’d be last a lot longer than that.
He also said it was an exciting time to be around the golf club, with a lot of changes instituted over the last six months to a year.
Mr Bayley said the club had elected a new committee and last year had changed its constitution to allow women to become full members of the club.
