Sunday 31 December 2006

Courses I've played : Pebble Rock Golf Club : 6-7/10

If you live in Joburg and don't mind an early start, an hour or so drive and some really warm weather for a round of golf then Pebble Rock should be on your list of courses to visit - if you are worried about the rating I gave, don't be (I'll get to that).

Pebble Rock is already a good course and it will probably get even better over the next few years once they get the fairways sorted out and put up some additional signage to make it easier to find.

The greens are stunning for such a young course (although the breaks are sometimes a little exaggerated), they are grainy but true, slow uphill and like lightning the other way (note to greenskeeper - move the cups around a little more often, its no fun lipping out because the edges of the cups are bevelled). My measure of a good course is if both low and high handicappers enjoy playing it - we had a 7, a 10 and a 15 in our group and everyone walked off without a bad thing to say about the course.

The only faults that really come to mind are the state of the fairways (they are quite patchy and need to grow a full covering of grass), the hole layouts that can be somewhat confusing (in some cases there are long distances to travel between a green and the next tee and then greens and tee's are right on top of each other elsewhere and the holes criss-cross each other in several places), the fact that property size constraints have given rise to some interesting and compromised hole layouts with ill-defined lines and directions off the tee (there are no caddies on the course, so we took carts and each cart had a map of the layout of the course, the map was well used and somewhat beaten up and didn't really help other than to give general direction), that there are no distance markers other than 100m and 150m poles (which didn't look and feel right in some case) and the club could do well to put distances on sprinkler heads, etc and publish a course guide and finally there a places where the houses are far to close to the course, in some places to the degree that I almost felt like I was teeing off in someones back-yard (coupled that with the fact that a particular home owner seems to enjoy watching his dog attacking golfers as they legitimately use the cart path that travels past his house).

I have to admit that once I got going I really enjoyed this course, it rewards accurate play and there is a good risk/reward return when you go for the pins on nearly all of the holes, but you do need to know the green layouts - I'd very much like to play the course again when the wind is not blowing quite so hard to get a feel for how it plays in normal highveld conditions (also knowing where to hit the ball off the tee will make playing that much more enjoyable, especially with the one or two blind shots that are required).

The course has a par of 70 (there are three par 3's on each 9, probably indicative of the space constraints) and even if the low stroking holes are interesting, they did not feel that difficult or particularly memorable - the signature hole for me on this course is the 461m par 5 16th (stroke 15) - you drive from an elevated tee, with a restricted view of the left hand side of the fairway (and water) with a large bunker and out of bounds down the right (a low draw off the bunkers down the right hand side of the fairway worked a treat), once you get down to play your next shot you have to avoid a lot of water in front and to your right and climb up quite a bit to get to the green. If you are a big hitter you will find you have a long carry to get it on without much area to bail out left or right but there is not much to worry about short of the green. The green itself is surrounded by banks covered in deep kikuyu grass and it slopes quite a bit downhill from back to front - you'll be wanting to keep the ball below the hole (I suppose the same could be said for every green on this course, but then again you can afford to give your putts a good thump if you are below the hole).

From an aesthetics perspective, the location of the club itself (it looks like the entire estate is contained within a game reserve) and the interior and design of the clubhouse and facilities will take some beating (one of my playing partners remarked that it looked very similiar to Pezula). To my mind the change rooms are a little spartan, but maybe I have been spoilt by all the locations I have played at recently. The staff where friendly and helpful (if a bit shy) and our breakfast was reasonably priced and generous (the bar did however seem to charge like wounded buffalo), but I suppose the best praise I can give the estate is that driving away I was figuring out how I was going to persuade the wife to move there!

The cost for 18 holes (excluding competition fees, levies, etc) on a Sunday was R150.

For more details you can visit the Pebble Rock website.

No comments: