Thanks to George for posting the photo. At age 78 he is our tech guy!
The funny thing is, we've built six greens and I don't think this is the biggest one. Our Biarritz green at the eighth hole is 74 yards from front to back.
I must say that I'm very pleased with the start we've gotten out here. The routing is probably different than I would have come up with if we hadn't been trying to apply Macdonald's ideas, so it sets us up to build some features unlike what we've built before. We are certainly not feeling too constrained by templates. We are just taking some great ideas and running with them.
By far the best surprise is that the contours of the ground (with the gorse cleared away for fairways) are really outstanding -- there is a great variety of stuff, from big ten-foot swells you have to hit over to reach the seventh fairway, to wrinkly undulations on the sixth and ninth fairways of the scale you'd find on The Old Course, to those big undulations in the fifth green that are pictured.
The one thing that's not a surprise is that even with a lot of rain in January, it's nice to be back in Bandon and working among friends, and you can bet that will have a positive effect on the finished product.