Originally Posted by archman
Ha ha, show me one golf course on this planet where 3,000 golf balls per day are lost in ponds.
What's a more realistic number, 20-50?
How is it that so many just have no clue about golf-ball retrieval? Seriously, I think a lot of misconceptions exist and thus a lot of the nay-saying about the industry simply arise from people who don't know how it works...or how bad many golfers are. Firstly, divers don't dive the same pond day after day, nor the same course for weeks at a time or something like that. You can spend a week cleaning out all the ponds on a course, or--as many do--you dive a pond at one course, go hit another pond at another course...and come back to the other ponds later so that you end up working any given pond about 3 months apart during the season (however long that is for the region where the course is located).
It's rather like crop rotation, oil changes for your auto...scheduling anything...all very simple concepts.
It's not hard to pull a few thousand balls from a single pond. You can spend an entire day, sometimes two, on a single pond. Others, you can clean out in a few hours and move to another. Most ponds across the country, you can work every 3 months, some more often or less often. With courses having several water traps/ponds and there being many courses, it's not hard at all to pull 2-3000 balls or more a day. No one's talking about 3,000 balls per day being hit into the water...rather, that is how many divers retrieve during a day spent diving.
However, I can say that while popping up to reorient myself once and check my air gauge (was murky, water full of post-rain silt) before finning across a pond, in about four minutes I watched two groups of golfers drop five balls in the water. It's not uncommon to hear up to five balls hitting the water (and that's just those near enough for me to hear) on a single dive of 45 minutes-1 hour.
I would say that ponds' acquisition rates are faster than most golfers would ever care to admit.