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Ready for winter golfers
WHAT-TO-DO - NASSAU, CABLE BEACH & PARADISE ISLAND - JAN 2006
Ready for winter golfers
Courses in prime condition
There is no accounting for taste in golf holes but it's interesting that both the pro and the director of golf at the lovely Cable Beach Golf Course pick a par 3 three as their personal favourite.
Director Chris Lewis chooses the 14th: "it's a pretty hole, 141-yards from the back tees," over one of the course's many ponds and waterways. Good players may take a nine or even a wedge from the elevated tee while the higher handicapper might go up to a seven iron, says Lewis.
Meanwhile, Richie Gibson, the affable pro at Cable Beach, likes the fourth hole, another easy-to-look-at par 3 over water. "You have to carry a bunker guarding the left side of the green, but it's basically an easy hole."
"Length is not a problem here but control is," says Lewis. "We're a resort course at just over 6,400 yards," but there is lots of water and a few blind shots from the tee. "You have to manage yourself, all the way around the golf course," says Lewis.
Highly recommended is a Players Guide that you can buy at the pro shop ($1.50) giving exact yardages and a heads-up on the best places to position your tee shots on every hole. Opened on the eve of the Great Depression in 1929, the Cable Beach course has seen many changes in its 77-year lifespan. For example, the first and last holes once ran along Goodman's Bay across West Bay St, an area that is now a public park and beach.
But the latest remodelling, by Fred Settle Jr of International Golf Design, is probably the biggest change ever. It was made necessary when the government claimed a strip of land 50 yds deep at the western edge of the golf course to build a new road.
In adjusting the course to this reduction in real estate, Settle somehow retained much of the charm of the original Emmet Devereux design, while adding a new water and drainage system. The course is now par 71 and 6,453 yds from the blues.
This year, the course is in "fantastic shape," says Lewis, groomed and ready for an influx of golfers from the snowbound north.
If you are a guest at the Atlantis complex on Paradise Island, you'll find conditions are superb for the winter-to-spring season at the beautiful Ocean Club Golf Course, according to General Manager T J Bagette.
The signature hole at Ocean is the fourth, a longish par 4 that plays into a prevailing wind, with an "aiming" bunker on the right and a green protected by the ocean on the right and a large bunker on the left.
If golfing in the subtropics in the winter is your idea of fun, you've come to the right place.
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