Fishing for golf balls allowed?
 

Yesterday, my husband looked out over the # 4 hole on Hemingway GC and saw a man with a plastic bag and ball retriever fishing for golf balls in the retention pond and along the banks under the grasses. Is this allowed? We only collect the balls that end up in our landscaping!

As with most any golf courses the answer is no. The course has no issue with you retrieving your own ball/ club that found its way into the pond. As for anything outside of that, as the commercial says the answer is a big fat No. Most courses contract with folks that do that for a living. These people pay the course/ developer for the ability to do this. I am certain if the ambassadors saw this they would take the individuals name and tell them to stop. May even take the balls away from them.

Further , ball hawks slow down play and are generally agrevating.

Doesn't sound like a ball hawk but rather someone not playing at the time. I have nothing against looking for your own ball and if there is another nearby.... bonus. We do have some here that think it's their mission to hawk every ball they see. We were behind a slow group on Southern Star Thursday and on the ninth hole the slowest player of the group went looking for his tee shot in the pond. after a couple of minutes he walked up to the green and dropped four balls to dry off. Also if your skills are as rusty as mine please don't play the back tees!

If the gators in the snakes don't mind neither do I

Also, it sometimes seems that the slowest golfers take several mulligans. And then it takes them forever to find all their balls. :sigh:

If you have not paid a green fee you should not be on any course during operating hours, basically dawn to dusk. You could possibly try after dusk but get your "Carry Permit" first as Gator mating season is fast approaching!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ball hawker
 

This was toward the end of the day and was not interfering with any play. We continue to hope there are no gators in our pond - haven't seen any since our arrival in Sept. Saw our first snake yesterday, which turned out to be a big ole black racer, which I think is a cousin to the black snakes we used to have in MD. I'm not fond of snakes, but this guy seemed to be looking for gecko lunch in our landscaping. No way would I be interested in looking for balls where critters hang out!

And they never fix ball marks, skid marks (from the worm burners across the greens), divots on the tee boxes and fairways or rake the bunkers. Ah, the privileged/entitled.

After hours who cares.

Fishing for balls from a pond is a wasteful exercise. Because those Callaway critters you catch become addicted to water, once tasted, and thus have a great desire to return to water

Personal Best Regards:

Just purchased 50 of these critters for 22 bucks, Amazon 2-day. Hope you're wrong. :ohdear:

It's called Trespassing!

The "who cares attitude" is most of the problem on golf courses around here

I recently reached into a clump of cord grass and picked up 1 ball. When I looked at my hand, there were 4 ticks crawling on my arm. Also consider Brown Recluse, Wood, and Banana Spiders that call the tall grass home.