“It’s Ali Baba’s cave here!” Knee-deep in the mud, Jules struggles to extract four golf balls from the bowels of a swamp. “A Wilson like that, you can sell it for 2.50 euros,” said the 21-year-old mustached man with satisfaction. He and two friends, Elie and Baptiste, scour the ponds golf courses of France to recover and sell “the balls of the lake”, these projectiles lost in the ponds which form the obstacles on the green. A real “treasure hunt” that can bring in from 10 cents to 30 euros per ball.
This Monday, December 20, they are attacking hole n ° 18 of the Golf Aix-les-Bains Club. A first collection session, a few days earlier, had already enabled them to rid the body of water of nearly 5,000 balls. “Here, there are around 30,000 who get lost in the water each year,” explains Pierre-Antoine Missud, the club director. “We have carp, ducks… A whole lot of fauna that lives on our route. There was a real need to empty them, ”he explains. So when the group of friends from Lyon came to offer him the services of their brand new bale collection company, Golfiller, he readily accepts.
Equipped with a wetsuit and spearfishing gloves, the accomplices immerse themselves without hesitation in the icy water. Using a dip net or by hand, they scrape the mud to extract the trapped bullets. The bags fill in a few minutes. In the pile: new balls “hit once” and the most damaged, submerged for years.
“We really collect a lot of bullets, it would be absurd to leave them at the bottom of the water,” Baptiste says indignantly, his hands in the mud. “They can have a new life, because they are completely reusable, despite certain misconceptions that golfers may have,” adds Jules. Once collected, the balls are cleaned and sorted in a home-made workshop by the three friends, then sold “half the price” on their website. An economic, ecological but also social initiative. “The goal is also to open golf to everyone because it is a very expensive sport,” the team concludes.
