Sometimes you are just happy to make a ton of pars. I did not have a single birdie today, but with how I played and the conditions, it was a good double-free round. Golf Club of Wentzville was drenched after the 2.5+ inches of rain this weekend and might have been closed if they weren’t presumably hurting for money with the Coronavirus. There were swirling winds and an off-and-on drizzle. Thankfully, it wasn’t cold. I had my jacket off all day and never really thought about putting it on.

It was so wet that I was a little afraid to dig my irons in, and as a result, I thinned a bunch of shots today. They weren’t terrible. It’s certainly better than hitting it fat and the ground just swallowing the club and the ball dribbling 50 yards or less. It did make the rough much tougher to deal with and killed any roll on my driver. Today might have been a good day to have the driver where I had it before launching high bombs. My lower-flighted knuckleballs from the cranked down settings did not get the distance they normally do. Add into that weird footing with muddy tee boxes and a slight block today, and my approach shots were from farther out than normal. The good news is I found the center of my driver more as the round went on and hit my best drive of the day on 18.

As an example of how wet it is, I hit the hill on the left side of the 16th green pin-high (pictured below from earlier this year). It is a shaved hill designed to throw the ball back towards the green. It’s the perfect miss for the pin placement today. If I had hit the same shot last week, it might have bounced and rolled down the hill and gone in. Today, it sat on the steepest part of the hill. Thankfully, I just kind of tapped it down the hill with putter and it rolled to tap-in range for par.

I only hit 6 greens today which would have been disastrous if my wedge game hadn’t come alive thanks to some new weapons. I bought two brand new Vokey SM7 wedges this weekend, a 54-degree and 60-degree. The difference was noticeable almost immediately. My old 54 and 60 were an older model Vokey and an old Cleveland. It was before Vokey started grinding clubs for the consumer market. I have no idea how I ever played without the M Grind. The turf interaction even with the ground saturated was amazing. I was picking it clean and the new grooves were a revelation. My grooves weren’t bad on my 54, but it’s insane how much spin I was losing on my old 60 compared to this feat in engineering from Mr. Vokey.

I had 8 up-and-downs today (my most since March 26), even though I wasn’t putting that great. The greens were way slower than they have been for obvious reasons and I left some putts short in the heart and misread and mishit some makeable birdie putts.

After a dreary round, of course, the sun came out as I putted out on the 18th green.

I already have tee times for the rest of the week. I made the proclamation last week that I was going to break par this week. With it being this wet, it’s going to be a bit harder than I thought. The weird byproduct of taking baby steps down (besides that 2-over 0.1 diff at Bear Creek Friday) is that I’m going to be close to scratch by the time I actually break par just once. I only got three shots today with my 4.1 index and missed matching it by one shot. This round will probably bring me sub-4 tonight on the revision. The last few shots are the hardest to shave, so the “Quest for Scratch” still might take a while to complete, but it certainly won’t take as long as if I had just caught fire sometime earlier and had one perfect day.

Next up, tomorrow at Incline Village.