A Fun Nine Holes

This post is a tad late. Denny and I played the Suwannee Country Club golf course on January 3. We waited until late in the afternoon since we had had four days of miserably cold weather for the Florida panhandle and we weren't sure if the afternoon was going to warm up enough for comfortable play. Fortunately, this is only a nine hole golf course, although the manager was kind enough to offer us a discount ($14 each to play which included the riding cart) for arriving at 3PM plus he told us he'd discount another nine even more should we chose to continue after our first nine holes. Nice people here.

The course is in hibernation and they had just fertilized the greens so it was a bit rough putting. However, while the golf course itself is a bit short at 3087 yards for the men's tees and 2395 yards for the women's tees it plays a lot harder than that. If you play eighteen holes, there is a second set of tees and therefore the men's yardage on the back nine is 3024 for a total of 6111 yards and the women's yardage is 2440 for a total yardage of 4835 yards. I don't have the slope/ratings for this course. There are multiple sand traps placed right in front of your shot to the greens and the greens themselves have slopes and slants that you misread so it is a challenge indeed.

Since we started so late, Denny and I rushed our shots a bit, trying to make sure we finished before dark and therefore we didn't play as well as we could have and we didn't give the golf course the chance it deserved to be played well. While short, the course is fun and certainly it wasn't busy at twilight on a winter's day. We would definitely give this little course another chance on another day.

Swiss Fairways Golf Course in Florida

There are a lot of golf courses in the Clermont/Orlando area but Denny and I are fairly parsimonious when it comes to paying golf fees so this time around he picked the Swiss Fairways Golf Course. For the two of us to play eighteen holes with a riding cart it cost $53.50 and by the end of the day we thought it well worth the money.

You will notice the sand hill cranes in the middle of the first photograph; I'd much rather have these birds with their prehistoric sounding croaks than the ubiquitous and very messy Canada geese.
The photograph above is of the second hole on the golf course. This is a par three hole and the picture was taken from the women's tee. At the men's tee there is a sign warning golfers to watch for boats which made us wonder since we appeared to be at the end of a channel.
The next thing we knew, there was a roar of engine and this:
Yeah, how many golf courses have YOU played where there are water skiers training beside the greens?

Skier distractions aside, Denny was playing the blue tees today at 6725 yards with a rating/slope of 72.3/126 while I played the red women's tees at 4691 yards with a rating/slope of 63.2/109.

While a few houses came into play for Denny because of wildly errant shots, for the most part the fairways are wide open albeit lined with water on a few holes. It is the sand traps that make this golf course evil, as shown by the eighth hole, a par 3, below. The entire front half of the green is ringed with a long sand trap. Rather than deal with it, Denny and I both parred the hole, a first for us (parring the same hole.)
On the back nine the course started backing up with players and Denny and I ended up pairing up with Vincent and Jerry (the Americanized versions of their French names which I couldn't pronounce.) Vincent and Jerry are from Orleans, France and are spending the month in Florida. They both have traveled extensively in the western part of the U.S. in the winter time and both absolutely love the vast and scenic beauty to be found in our country. Denny and I agree! We spent the rest of a very pleasant afternoon on the golf course with these two gentlemen and followed our game with a great meal at the Oakwood Smokehouse which serves great BBQ. Denny and I tied scores (under a hundred but that's as far as I'll share) and we had a great day. We'd love to go back but the temperatures have dropped here in Florida and I don't think we'll be going out in 40 degree weather to play golf. We don't love the game THAT much!

Torrey Oaks Golf Course

For the second week of our stay in Wauchula we decided to play golf a little bit closer to home at the Torrey Oaks Golf Course in Bowling Green, Florida. This time we paid $23 each to play eighteen holes with a riding cart and we were able to pay those rates for a 10AM tee time. Credit cards are accepted for that rate also.

The fairways and rough is a little rougher at Torrey Oaks than what they were at the Bluffs. It is a much shorter course, playing shorter than the distances given at the tee boxes and on the score card which was rather confusing for us first time players. Per the score card, the blue tees have a yardage of 6335 with a slope/rating of 128/70.7 while the women's tees have a yardage of 5075 yards and a slope/rating of 116/68.1. As I said, the course played shorter than that, as I ended up with four pars and that is unheard of for me--I am a bogey/double bogey golfer through and through. So I for one, had fun on the course.

There are a several holes with water hazards although they really don't come into play for the women's tees. There are plenty of sand traps and this is a course where they make sure to have a rake attached to the back of the riding cart so there's no excuse for not raking the sand traps.
There are houses built on the course and they can come into play with errant shots as can some of the trees but if you hit the ball straight this is an easy course for the average golfer. We were joined on the back nine by a French Canadian couple whose grasp of English wasn't terrific but who played some really good golf and we managed to have a good time despite a bit of a communication problem at times. For my golfing ego, I'd play this course again simply to see a lower score than I normally shoot.

Although we didn't check out the daily/weekly rates since we're staying at a free-for-us membership campground, Torrey Oaks Golf Course also has an adjacent RV park that is very attractively set up and maintained with spacious RV sites. Stay and play, as it were.

The Bluffs Golf Course

Although there is a nine hole golf course near to our campground, we decided to drive ten miles south of Zolfo Springs to the Bluffs Golf Course, 8037 US Hwy 17S, (863) 735-2363 to play its eighteen hole course. I think it was a good decision.

The Bluffs is a shorter course so Denny played the blue tees at a distance of 6254 yards with a slope/rating of 116/69.9. I stayed with the women's tee for a distance of 4809 yards and a slope/rating of 108/67.2. On a bright, dry day we had to remember to play one club longer in distance due to being near sea level, something another golfer told us years ago. It's an easy rule to remember when the weather is humid but harder when the weather is so beautifully dry.

The front nine holes are wide open although there is water along several of the holes. Hole #7 is a par 3 with a green that slopes towards a small lake (and folks playing the blue tee have to hit over the lake.) While the open fairways makes getting to the greens fairly easy, the greens have enough slope and tilt to be tricky. The back nine has several holes that have narrower fairways lined by trees so you can hit into a little more trouble there. It was on the back nine that Denny mentioned that there were no sand traps to which I replied "yes actually there are, you just haven't hit any for once". And of course, on the next hole he ended up in a sand trap. Go figure.

Denny and I had a tee time for 1:11PM and we were the last people on the course although we had to wait on every tee because of all the foursomes ahead of us. We paid $30 each to play 18 holes with a riding cart and to get that price we had to pay cash. The cost would have gone up if we had used a credit card. All in all, I think this is a course we would play again.

Edited 12/17/10: We actually paid $15 each to play 18 holes of golf after 1P for a total of $30. My error.