This rule in a nutshell: If you find your ball, the three-minute search time pauses, but it restarts if you lose sight of it again and have to resume looking. If the remaining time runs out and you’ve already played a provisional, that is now the ball in play under penalty of stroke-and-distance.
Summer sun and a dollop of rain. Put the two together and you find grass starts growing very quickly. The rough at my course has gone skywards in the last couple of weeks and hitting it into stuff at waist – and even shoulder high – in a couple of places is a very clear and present danger.
Yes, some lost ball situations are going to crop up and this email question sums up some of the posers you might be facing on the golf course as the heat continues…
“My playing partner hooked his ball into incredibly heavy rough. Wisely he decided to play a provisional, this went straight down the middle.
“Amazingly we found his original ball, which was in thick grass. He decided to play it and stepped away a few yards to survey his shot.
“He then was unable to relocate his original ball so thick was the rough! After much searching and some discussion, we agreed he could take a penalty drop from the approximate area where the ball had been found then lost.
“Is this correct or should he have gone back to the tee?”
Lost ball golf rule: What if a found golf ball becomes lost again?
Assuming the sands of time have run out, the answer is neither. The provisional ball is now in play. The Rules of Golf address what happens if you’ve found a ball and then – for whatever reason – can’t subsequently locate it.
It’s in a clarification to Rule 18.2 and gives the example of a player who has hit their ball into some high rough. They find it after two minutes and leave to go and get a club. When they return they can’t find it.
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You all know you get three minutes to search for a ball.
But what the clarification reveals is that, when you find it, the clock stops. If you then get into a situation where you’re unable to detect it, the timer starts running again.
You’ve got what remains of the three minute search time before the ball becomes lost.
In this situation, when time has run out, it’s not a matter of taking a penalty drop or going back to the tee because a provisional ball has been played.
You play that “provisionally under penalty of stroke and distance”, says Rule 18.3. It’s a vehicle to save time if your original ball becomes lost (or is found to be out of bounds or becomes known or virtually certain to be in a penalty area).
So don’t get confused with machinations about procedures and drops. The answer was sitting in the middle of the fairway the whole time.
Got a question for our expert?
Despite the changes to the Rules of Golf in 2019 and 2023, there are still some that leave us scratching our heads. I’ll try to help by featuring the best of your queries in this column.
What do you think of this lost ball golf rule? Let me know by leaving a comment below, email me at s.carroll@nationalclubgolfer.com or get in touch on X.
