Bunker Rakes
Posted on: 22 February
The Rules of Golf do not specify whether rakes should be placed in or out of bunkers.
Although the R&A recommends that they be placed out of bunkers, this is not always practical from a maintenance standpoint for facilities such as ours with a relatively small number of grounds staff.
Therefore, members are strongly encouraged to place rakes within bunkers away from where they are likely to interfere with play. Ideally, you don’t want to place rakes across the line of play or in a location where they could trap balls in a difficult spot – e.g., within a bunker on a steep slope near the lip as shown below.
If a rake does trap your ball, you can move the rake, but you must replace the ball on its original spot if it moves. This can be problematic if a rake traps your ball on a steep slope where the ball will not stay. If you can’t find another location within the bunker where the ball will stay at rest that is not nearer to the hole, you are facing one or two penalty strokes to obtain relief.
The recommendation is to leave the rake on a flat area in the bunker parallel to the line of play. Avoid throwing the rake in the bunker; If the rake bounces, you’ll create indentations in the sand that another ball could come to rest in. Also avoid placing the rake in the middle of a large bunker as this could delay play when the next player retrieves the rake and needs to rake their footprints before moving to another part of the bunker to play their shot.
The image below shows the recommended placement of a rake in a large bunker (e.g., on the 8th hole).
