Riverside county eased their restrictions, so I was finally able to get out and play a round. They had rules in place for Covid 19. Masks were required (not enforced), Social Distancing was required (impossible if you're sharing a cart), and you weren't supposed to touch the flag sticks or rakes. It was a little chaotic, being the first weekend of golf for most people in SoCal, but people were trying to do the right thing.
For numerous reasons (see below), I was not able to post my score, but if I had paid more attention to what I was doing, I probably could have posted it.
The first big thing was no rakes. Actually, the rakes were present, but we were asked not to use them. So I gave myself relief whenever I went into a bunker. I did consider other options, but for pace of play, this seemed the best. By rule, you can take a two-stroke penalty, and drop outside the bunker. If I had tracked how many bunkers I had gone into, I could have applied this penalty after the round. But I didn't. I also read that some courses are recommending "raking" the bunker with your feet after you play your shot. While that would fall within the rules of golf, I think it would lead to some pretty gnarly lies in the bunkers.
In addition to the problem with the rakes, a couple of par 4's had been shortened to par 3's, and one hole was closed. The handicap rules allow you to adjust for un-rated yardages, and they also allow you to take your score-plus-handicap in the situation where a hole is closed. But we didn't finish one of the shortened holes because we couldn't find it. There was a sign on the "tee" indicating that the hole had been altered to a par 3, and the yardage was 118. I didn't see a green (even a temporary one), or a flag stick. I took my 9-iron and hit it in the direction of a couple of bunkers that might have been near the green. My ball hit a cart path and was never seen again. When we got 118 yards from the tee, we found everyone else's tee shot, but no hole, and no green (temporary or otherwise). We saw what was probably the regular green another 150 yards further. It did not look like the green was accessible. So we picked up and moved to the next hole (which was the one that was closed).
And the final straw that made me not post my score was the raised cups. I actually might have gotten an illegitimate hole-in-one. I saw my tee shot go on the green, and when I got there, it was about six inches from the cup, and the ball mark was about six inches from that. I wrote down a 2 and circled it, and moved on to the next hole.
Putting to the raised cups is interesting. It certainly makes you more aggressive, because if you hit the raised cup, then it's considered holed (not by the real rules, see below). The only hole that I 3-putted was the one hole where I picked up when I hit the max score for our club. I wrote down 9-3 for that one. It was not a club outing, but I usually play by our club local rules, which includes the max score, and free relief from dirt cart paths.
Turns out, the USGA has some guidelines, and you are supposed to count your putts as holed only if you believe they would have gone in to a regular cup. There's obviously some judgement here, and I wasn't tracking which ones may not have gone in. Hit the cup and move on.
I will attempt to follow these guidelines the next time I go out:
https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/rules-hub/rulesarticles/covid-19-rules-and-handicapping-faqs.html
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