Midsummer Outing

It was a promising drive down to St Andrews Bay with the temperature readings rising all the way - finally showing 18.5 degrees C as we pulled in to the car park. It was pretty windy however and shorts were quickly dismissed.

We had lunch and then waited as we discovered we were immediately behind a huge outing of 40, all in buggies - it looked like being a long afternoon - and it was. Here's Peter pondering at the start:


I was playing around with my camera, having discovered a new "smile and shoot" feature - it failed with Peter, but Jack's pearly gnashers made it work OK:




The team lined up at the start, tops billowing in the wind:

The course was bare and very dry - playing like a true links in most places.Ken and I hit drives of over 300 yards at the 1st hole - Ken's with a 4-iron! That was the easy bit - the chips and putts went almost as far on huge greens that were by far the fastest that we've played on this year.

St Andrews Bay is in the throes of major changes with the Torrance being totally re-designed in preparation for being an Open qualifier in a couple of years, so it was mostly the Devlin course we played - although the 2nd hole was temporarily converted to a par 3 and the 4th and 5th holes were out of commission - replaced by the 17th and 18th from the Torrance. The course has now been re-named The Kittocks.

The 7th hole is a fascinating risk/reward hole with multiple bunkers in the middle of a fairway split in two. On the left is an out of bounds wall and it is possible to drive the green if you're brave enough and get a hard enough bounce. Most of team Alpha chickened out - my prayers below are merely that my camera would not be blown off its perch before the picture was taken:

Dan had a very lightweight pull trolley and it was constantly being blown around. At the 9th, he left his trolley short of the green and walked up to putt out as I stood in the bunker. As I was about to play my bunker shot (which I holed!) I caught Dan's trolley careering towards me with the following end result:

It was well after 8:00 pm before we were all off the course, but, after a quick phone call to the Balaka from the 17th fairway to advise them we would be late for our curry, we still had time for a couple of excellent pints of Greene King IPA at the Whey Pat, where we did the prizegiving.

The drive home was fascinating - particularly if, like me, you were a passenger. The sky was never dark, even at 12:30 am when we got home.