Strange things can happen in the dark

The month of October can bring us some good golf weather at Glendale. As the days get shorter, it obviously stays dark longer in the morning. The first tee time today is 7am, but sunrise is not until 7:05 am. Our crew started work at 5:30 am, so we were working for at least the first hour in complete darkness. It might as well be 2am, the conditions are exactly the same.  I took the photo below at 6:00am this morning of Genaro mowing #1 green with lights on his mower.

I don't like to mow greens in the dark because it's hard to do a good job. You can't see all of the ball marks and it's real easy to miss a small rock that got shot out of a bunker. If the mower catches a rock just right, it can bend the reel and the bedknife of the mower. That small rock can wind up costing us about $750 in parts and labor to fix the mower. Several other things can happen affecting course setup that don't occur in the light of day. Tee marker alignment can be way off. I'm sure some of our early morning players have come up to the first tee and seen the tee markers lined up way off. Hole placement is even worse. I have chosen some hole locations in the dark that looked fine, but in the light of day they were terrible! You can't see subtle slopes on a green with a flashlight in the dark. We lose an additional 3 1/2 minutes of light everyday this month, and on Halloween sunrise is at 7:53am. So the next time you are out playing early in the morning and you have to play an odd hole location, just remember that strange things can happen in the dark!