Lost balls

While searching for a lost ball during a practrice round today I found 62 others! Three of them has my mark (blue arrow) on them. At this rate I will not need to buy any more new golf balls for a while.

At the 4th, par 5 hole I used my 3 wood to hit the second shot. It went wide. I dropped 8 more balls on the fairway and hit them. They went about 180M. I was pleased to find 3 of them ending up in a cluster on the fairway and only 2 balls were in the rough. I teed off 12 balls at the 14th hole and lost only one ball which hit a tree and disappeared in the rough. Slowly I am getting more consistency. By the time I came to the last hole it was already getting dark. I needed the pin to see the hole. I will put a torchlight in my bag...

I love Saturdays. On Saturday mornings the kiwis (New Zealanders) hold garage sales. Yesterday I bought 200 used balls for $45. (The cost of a new golf ball is around $2 each.) There is an old lady whose farm is just beside a golf course. Valerie Morgan told me that after her cows ate all the grass on certain paddocks she regularly found about 20 golf balls during her walks around her dairy farm. She sells all the good shiny ones to other golfers for $1 each. I pay her 25 cents each for the rest. We have a very good deal going!

In America there was once a very clever young man, no, not Bill Gates! His hobby was scuba diving. On many golf courses large ponds are dug at strategic points to trap wayward balls, usually in front of a green or along the right side of the fairways. These water hazards soon filled with golf balls. This scuba diver quietly signed contracts with all these golf courses giving him exclusive rights for recovery of lost balls. Initially he used his mother's washing machine to wash these recycled balls and sell them. Soon he could buy his own washing machines and employ many scuba divers and started a very lucrative business! Today he is a millionaire and his second hand golf balls are exported and sold all over the world! I found them in K-Mart and the Warehouse, selling for around $1 each.

I would not pay good money for something I can get any time for free! This is the beauty of the natural gully system which drains Hamilton. All heavy down pours ended up in the gully which leads eventually into the Waikato River. At the Narrows where I started golfing there are five holes with ob lines on the right hand side of the fairways. Every time I chased my wayward balls outside the ob lines I seldom find my own ball. However I always managed to come back up the gully with pockets full of other people's balls. One time, while playing alone I found 96 lost balls.