This would perhaps be better titled as a frequently ignored rule. I can also report a strange bit of human nature – the search time was reduced from 5 to 3 minutes at the start of 2019 with the aim of speeding up play. When refereeing we will start a stopwatch at the start of a search and can say categorically that very few “5 minute” searches went beyond 3 minutes before the player gave up. Now however, many players seem to want to use the full 3 minutes, so the average time spent searching has possibly gone up!
It is actually very difficult to tell a playing partner that they have had their 3 minutes so we need to move on. (Although it is often well applied to the group in front of you as they search – how many times have you heard “they must have had the 3 minutes by now”?) And in the scenario in the video even more difficult to tell someone who has continued searching after the 3 minutes that they can’t play the ball they have just found because it is lost.
How would you deal with a playing partner who wishes to carry on with a ball found after the 3 minute search time is over? Let me have your suggestions below.
Golf Rules Guru 
This happened to me a few months ago: The quick question is: Can you pause the 3 minutes? … A big slice off the tee and the ball could have become stuck in an area with trees or gone beyond this onto or over the adjacent fairway (or stuck in a tree). A brief look in the tree area told us it could not be found there – no more than one minute spent, but the 3 minutes had been started. A ball was on the adjacent fairway, too far to be identified and could have been a ball from another group on the teeing area of that hole. Out of courtesy, I waited until all of that group had hit their tee shots. The ball on the fairway was not mine (it belonged to the first player to tee off from the group on that hole), but then my ball was visible in the first cut of rough the other side of that fairway. By that point more than 3 minutes had elapsed since we started looking, but due to the pause out of courtesy, we had not been looking for the ball for 3 minutes (probably under 2 minutes). I took the penalty and played my provisional ball as 3 off the tee, but could I have played my original ball without penalty?
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Hi Roger
You can suspend the search for legitimate reasons, such as waiting for another group to play – either on an adjacent hole that could impact the search area, or to let a group a play through. As such, in your example your ball would not have been lost.
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Ah, a bit of Googling tells me I could have temporarily have stopped the search clock – exemption under 18.2a(1)/1: ‘A player is searching for their ball for two minutes, then steps aside to allow the following group to play through. The search time stops when the search is temporarily stopped, and the player is allowed one more minute to search.’ So I could have played the original ball after all!
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