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Neil Matt & I took a trip out to Emerald. It was another beautiful day & a couple of degrees cooler up there than down in the city. The course is in a gorgeous setting, surrounded by gum trees & native birds.
The course is very tight. A lot of the tee shots have a tunnel effect with trees on both sides making you have to hit straight. It’s not the longest course going around but it protects itself with a well thought out design & tight fairways. If you are a little wayward this course will bite you.
The fairways are well looked after & the greens are about what you would expect from a country course.
It is a nice course with friendly staff, if you are up that way, well worth stopping in for a round

We played 13th Beach today, it is a course that I have been wanting to play for years. We played the Beach course which to me was a bit of  a misnomer . At no point did we see the beach.  Don’t get me wrong, the course was fantastic, the fairways were perfect & the greens were true. Perhaps  I built the course up too much in my head  but I was expecting to at least see the ocean at some point. We played the course with the wind blowing, but playing on the coast I guess you would be dreaming to expect it to be still. I think I lost about 8 balls during the round ( the only comp I won all day), it is a punishing course when you play off line. One of the things I was really disappointed with was the bunkers. I played out of about 5 bunkers, 2 of them were great. The rest of them were crap, fuck all sand & full of stones. Neil, Matt & Ian felt the same way, considering we were that close to the beach you would expect a decent amount of sand in a bunker.
But enough bitching. We headed out to play the course because it was Trevor’s birthday & as stupid as it sounds he couldn’t make it. Neil, Matt Ian & myself tried to make up for it but we couldn’t make up for the fact that Trevor wasn’t there, even with a video call to Trevor which may have made things worse 🙂 To sum things up, I have been dying to play this course for years, perhaps I built it up too much in my head, but I can’t get over the fact that there wasn’t any holes that played in view of the ocean.