I was blessed with a sunny, quite calm day on Saturday to discover Deal with Mark Chaplin as my intrepid guide.
It was amazing in every respect, and I was only too keen to grab a application after the round and become a member.
Much has been said on here about the course and I feel unable to improve on most of it, so I'll keep it brief.
I though the routing was genius, especially 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 14, 15 and 16. So much movement in a site with such flat dunes. And the thing that undepins it is how natural it all looks. The closest comparison I can come up with is for any yachties on here to think of a really lumpy sea, frozen still.
It's wonderful to have such large slopes feeding balls into the bunkers, effectively making the catchment area as much as three times the size of the bunkers themselves, avoiding the need for a huge bunker that looks ugly and costs a bomb to maintain.
It's awesome that the wide driving zones allow you to use driver and if placed well, you get rewarded for that, but if you err, you will get eaten up. Classic risk reward, which you don't see enough (or maybe I don't play enough of the right courses!).
Reachable par fives and short par fours are the holes that turn me on more than any other, and 3, 6 and 16 are great examples of that. I could play them for years and not get bored.
My camera isn't great and the light was a bit sharp, so I decided to just concentrate on getting angles I have not seen on GCA.
1st green
3rd fairway - approach from 200m out
Closer to the 3rd green, the flag appears, check out those dunes! The yellow flag is visible to the right.
3rd green from the right.
Par 3 4th from the tee.
The view back to the tee shows how the back feeds away anything long
The 10th from behind. Shows just how average the inside of the dogleg is, despite looking tempting from the tee.
The clubhouse
