That original routing pictured above was the result of my first two-day visit to the site and a lot of work on the map afterward. However, it had its problems, and I had a lot of people commenting on the layout afterward. Greg Ramsay had a couple of holes in mind he wanted us to include [the sixth made the final cut, but a couple of others did not].
It was Mike Keiser who went to the site in 2001 and suggested that the back nine might be better off routed in the other direction, so that the finishing holes played along the beach. We hadn't been able to do that at Pacific Dunes and lots of "retail golfers" have told him we should have. Up until then, I had been blindly in love with hole #10 on the plan above -- an homage to the first at Machrihanish -- but when I went back there in December 2002, I had to admit that the proposed green would get buried with sand regularly [that's why we drew two of them], so we started looking at alternatives including Mike's suggestion. I stumbled upon the site for the 17th green and tee and then we figured out how to make the rest of it work. The current 13th green is the only other green in the same position on that nine.
We never drew up the final routing for the course because it was still unclear at that point whether Greg was going to find funding for the course, or whether he might eventually get desperate and let Greg Norman bring funds to the table -- in which case neither Mike Clayton nor myself wanted to provide our routing on paper! And once the funding was in place, via Richard Sattler, there was no need to draw the routing, our crew was on the ground and getting their instructions directly from the source.
The back nine routing did evolve a bit just before we started, as well. I knew that the third hole shown on the plan above would be impossible into the wind, but I loved the green site, so eventually we broke it up into two short par-4's going out. 4 & 5 as depicted are the current fifth and sixth; what's shown as #6 here is fairly close to the Little Devil but we had actually given that hole up at one point and Mike Clayton suggested putting it back; and then the eighth and ninth are different because Greg wanted so much to get the green site for the eighth near the water.
I love Greg Ramsay and it's correct to credit him with the vision for the course, but just because he was visible on Golf Club Atlas way back when does not mean he "made it happen." Richard Sattler decided to take the leap of faith, and I made an offer he couldn't refuse, or Barnbougle would still be no more than Greg's unfulfilled dream.
There is a souvenir book about Barnbougle to be released in the spring, which I've just seen the proofs of. Unfortunately I didn't write much of it so the full story of the routing is not included in it.