I'd like to add my thanks to Jerry Savardi for hosting me and my friend last week. It's a great course and, from the looks of the almost completed first lodge, the facilities are going to be first class, and the people were very nice to us during our visit. Congratulations to Tom and his team for building another outstanding course, it's quite a place.
The course is growing in nicely, that area has gotten a lot of rain over the last month and the fairways were green, contrasting very nicely with the tall brown grass in the rough. The rough was calf high in many places and very thick, balls that went in often couldn't be found -- we played without caddies in high winds and lost twice as many balls there than at any other course. I didn't pull out any measuring tape but the fairways certainly didn't seem as wide as, say, Pacific Dunes or Ballyneal or Barnbougle, so the rough came into play. The wind was really up the day we played there, blowing around 25 mph, and the folks there said that the playing conditions were the toughest they had been all year.
I agree with Tom's comment about the beauty of the place, it's more wooded than the other courses of his that I've played and there aren't a lot of views of the sea. The beauty is more subtle, in the design of the bunkers, the contrast of the rough with the fairways, the stone walls, and the green complexes. It is a big course, and the stone walls give it a reallyl nice feel. It's hard to evaluate it after playing it just one time particularly under those conditions, it felt long (7426 from the tips...we played from the next set up at 6863) and tough while we were battling it last week.
I have some pictures as well, but I've never posted pictures before and I keep getting an error message that says "uploader is full, please try a smaller file or contact administrator" -- the pics I'm trying to put up are only about 80KB, so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong...if someone wants to drop me a note with some technical direction, I'll add some more pictures.
Rob