Kiawah Island Golf Holiday Review

There is a great deal to be said for leaving the best until last on a golf holiday. Whether ‘best’ means the most beautiful scenery, the feeling of standing where the greats have stood, or the most daunting challenge, that final round is the one you want to talk about all the way home. Just occasionally you find a place which gives you all three, and the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island is such a place.

After a flight from the UK to Charlotte and a hop to Charleston, the drive to Kiawah, the middle part of South Carolina’s triple mecca with Hilton Head and Myrtle Beach, takes you to a beautiful strip of land guarding the Carolina coast from the Atlantic Ocean. Whether you decide to stay in the luxurious rooms and villas at The Sanctuary or rent one of the dramatic timber-framed houses which sit directly on the beach, the resort offers lots of opportunity for reviews of the day’s play whilst sipping a sundowner to the backdrop of the crashing surf.

The warm up courses would be, in any other place, that best, final round. The Jack Nicklaus designed Turtle Point is, like all of Kiawah’s courses, beautifully maintained, and tests the radar more than adequately after the journey. Featuring narrow fairways, encroaching water hazards, and small targets for approaches to the green, the course is deceptively difficult. The tree-lined course dappled with sunlight masks the tricky winds which can tug your approaches into trouble, whilst putting on the subtle greens requires all of your concentration.

Gary Player’s Cougar Point gives the opportunity to finally pull the driver from the bag, with long par fours and fives providing generous landing areas, whilst the shorter fours and the short holes require excellent club selection and concentration. The Kiawah River, which runs through the course, is a constant danger to errant shots, and when you arrive at the 17th, with water all down the right, the combination of fairway, green, and blue water is breathtaking. Negotiate this one safely and you are nearly ready for the ultimate test.

Pete Dye’s Ocean Course at Kiawah is rightly famous for many reasons. Not only can you see the ocean from all 18 holes, more than half of them actually run alongside the surf. When you arrive, the first thing you get is the warning about ‘Gators. Apparently they are faster over 25 yards than anything, and certainly faster than a golf buggy. If you weren’t shaking at just the thought of playing this course, the Gator Warning is certainly enough to get your eyes peeled.

Where the danger lies on The Ocean Course is heavily reliant upon wind direction, but broadly speaking, the front nine gives you a vague belief in your own ability before the back nine rips it away and feeds it to the Gators. There is no hole which doesn’t offer a test, but after the turn the screw keeps turning for the most talented club golfer, just as it did for the best in the world during the infamous ‘War On The Shore’ 1991 Ryder Cup.

Many of the holes are lined with ‘Waste’ bunkers, from some of which you need a twenty-step climb up a ladder to re-emerge onto the fairway. Every hole makes you want to pull out the driver and rip it, and each one then makes you wish you hadn’t, and approach shots only a few yards offline can leave daunting chips up near vertical slopes to the undulating greens. It could be dispiriting if it weren’t so beautiful, the sky not so blue, and the herons, egrets and osprey not so ubiquitous. It’s the first time I have had a vulture watch me putt.

So it is tough, but it is also brilliantly designed, and provides a magical feeling of achievement as you progress through the round, not least because you know that players much better than you have faced even greater torture at its’ hands. When you stand on the tee at the 17th, you can look back seemingly miles to the tee where Mark Calcavecchia finally unravelled, four up with four to play against Monty, and then two into the azure water in front of the green, and mentally shot with no chance up the 18th. You can think of hitting it from back there, too, but it’s hard enough from where you are standing, and should you land it softly on the green you can tell yourself you did it where so many have failed.

When you finally walk from the 18th you can remind yourself as you add up the score that this is one of the greatest tests in golf, you can listen to the crashing of the surf and listen to the calls of the myriad birds overhead. You can remind yourself that after a while you stopped looking for ‘gators, so enthralling was the course, and of the drive, the chip, the putt which was just perfect. Then you can repair to one of the island’s brilliant restaurants for some soft-shelled crab, jugs of margaritas, and mud pie and prepare your tales for the journey home.

And you can know that you saved the best until last and that you will remember the Ocean Course at Kiawah forever. For this and a host of Kiawah Island Golf Holidays, visit Your Golf Travel who have a host of packages available including the dream tour including the US Masters.