Pacific Dunes

Wow! Tom Doak, you are a genius. Barnbougle Dunes is good. Pacific Dunes is great! Perhaps it was the fact that I played a little better today and shot 79, or perhaps it was the amazing weather from the tee shot on the first to the 3-foot putt on the last - glorious sunshine and a one club breeze on the rare occasion.

To begin with, I am going to quote the course designer, Tom Doak, taken from the Pacific Dunes yardage book.

Every architect dreams of building among sand dunes, in the same terrain where golf was conceived in the British Isles. Pacific Dunes is that dream come true for me. I suspect that any golfer would have found some of the same holes, like th par 4 thirteenth hole along the ocean, but it was an enormous responsibility to find the best possible routing on a site of such potential.

The rippling fairways are mostly as we found them; so are the natural bunkers at the second, seventh, eleventh, thirteenth, sixteenth and eighteenth holes, which guide our routing of holes. The layout is short enough to give every golfer hope, but its rugged nature will test every facet of your game. We hope you have many more opportunities to play over this beautiful ground, and to come to appreciate it as we have.

We couldn't have asked for a better day to begin our Bandon Dunes adventure. If this is a sign of things to come, I never want it to end. The routing of the inland holes is simply awesome and full of character while the oceanside holes are jaw-droppingly speactacular. Photos simply don't do the scale of the course justice.