Huge CapillaryFlow will bring savings to Old Chatham

“The property here is very large, and so the bunkers are very large too!!” says director of golf course management Brian Powell, of Old Chatham in Durham, North Carolina. “We have just over 200,000 square feet of sand, pretty much twice the average for a US course, and that means we spend a lot of time, anda lot of money, on bunker maintenance.”

In fact, Powell says, Old Chatham spends around 18 per cent of its total maintenance budget on bunker upkeep, a figure he is keen to reduce.. “Anything we can do to reduce that number means we can spend the resource somewhere else–or just save the club money,” he says.

Old Chatham was designed by Rees Jones, and opened in 2000. Jones, and associate Greg Muirhead, are still involved with all decisions on changes to the course. And now, along with the architects, and contractor Duininck Golf, Powell is rebuilding the fairway bunkers, slightly reducing some in size, and installing the CapillaryFlow Bunkers liner system.

“We rebuilt and lined our greenside bunkers about ten years ago,” says Powell. “We looked at the CapillaryFlow product then, and I liked the concept very much, but it was extremely new to the US market and in the end we decided to go with a different liner. But I have always kept an eye on the CapillaryFlow Bunkers product, and when we decided it was time to rebuild the fairway bunkers, we chose to use it. All along, I felt that, because it is concrete-based, it would be likely to last longer than other, competing products, and, as is well known,CapillaryFlow Bunkers can be installed in virtually any weather conditions, which makes the build easier and more predictable than with other, competing solutions. Additionally, as the bunkers age, I believe we will be able to change our sand more easily with a strong concrete liner than we could with other products, which we are more likely to damage.”

The course at Old Chatham will be closed for four months during the project, which includes regrassing of greens, tees, fairways and approaches, and will reopen on September 23. The bunker work is expected to last eight weeks, and Powell says they will be done by the end of July. “We’re already about 70 per cent done with the bunker work, and I’m really pleased with the CapillaryFlow Bunkers product,” he says. “We have always spent too much time in our bunkers, and I believe the product will help us spend less time in future!”