With a name like Blue Ocean, one might not expect the superintendent of the 150-acre golf course in Sechelt to expound the virtues of going brown. But Blue Ocean isn’t just any golf club – it’s one of the very few that uses only rainwater it collects in its ponds and reservoir to maintain its greens. “I can’t name another course that I know of in North America that is self-sufficient,” said Tristan Tuplin. “Whatever Mother Nature gives us is what we have.”
And evidently, they have enough to keep their course if not a shimmering emerald, a passable pale green. Tuplin irrigates a total of 35 acres with approximately 11.5 million gallons of collected rainfall. No potable water, no Chapman water system.
Tuplin pointed out examples of his dictum – “brown is the new green” – as we bumped along the path in a beat-up golf cart, water measurement device in the back, his wheaten terrier Hazel bounding ahead. Along the path were hillocks of fescue grasses that he said they used to maintain before it got too expensive. We stop at the seventh green and Tuplin pulls out his device, which lets him calculate soil moisture. He plunges a probe into the earth and pulls out his tablet to get a reading: 64 per cent. “It’s a diagnostic for us to control [water use].”
The club is in the process of replacing 25-year-old irrigation heads that spray wide circles of water with $300 fixed ones, adding precision to the watering regime. Tuplin built a water management plan after the drought in 2015, complete with a series of in-house water restriction stages and guidelines. In the early 2000s, the club bought water from the SCRD to a maximum of 50,000 gallons per night, but the economics and environmental impact of using potable water stopped making sense, so the club went self-sufficient.
Had a water metering system – and billing – not been in place, Blue Ocean may not have made the self-sufficiency switch. The effort is significant, and so are the risks. If Tuplin gets his diagnostics wrong, or if the precious window in which he relies on reservoir water grows, he’ll lose another kind of green. “I have an endgame, and that’s dead [grass] and no job.”
Coast residents will likely have a chance to take similar, albeit humbler, strides with self-sufficiency with a proposal in this year’s Sunshine Coast Regional District budget to offer a rebate of $500 for installing a rainwater harvesting system. The SCRD has offered a rain barrel rebate program in the past, but with little uptake, the program was cancelled.
After last week’s SCRD board meeting, it seems appetite for the Chapman drawdown at the provincial level is running dry, and an “engineered lake” is years away. According to the SCRD Regional Sustainability Plan, water consumption is supposed to be reduced by 33 per cent by 2020.
Blue Ocean may be on to something.
