With thanks to Scott Warren for hosting my pictures, I will present course no. 15 separately ... the Farm Course at Cape Kidnappers.
*15. Cape Kidnappers (Farm Course), 2008.
One of the great things about working at Cape Kidnappers was having free run of all 5000 acres of the sheep station while we were building the course. We would go up the hill in the morning and come back down at dark, and at lunchtime, we would sometimes go check out other parts of the property. There is even a stretch of dunes along the ocean side of the peninsula, but it was so hard to get to, it didn't seem reasonable to locate a course there, and it only looked big enough for nine holes between the sea and some outrageously steep hillsides.
There were really only two feasible sites for golf on the property ... the site we built on, which might have fit 27 holes if we had worked in the next two fields further toward the entrance, and a deep valley out near Black Reef, a couple of miles past today's pro shop. The attention garnered to the course we've built proves that we made the right choice, but I always felt kind of sad that most people never got to see the rest of the property and the true scale of the place.
So, in 2007-08, I suggested to Julian Robertson that he consider building a second 18 holes at the Cape. The working name was the Farm course, because the idea was to build a low-cost course with just irrigated greens and tees, for a truer N.Z. experience for the guests and an affordable option for New Zealanders to visit the property. Bruce Hepner and I went down and laid it out, stuck flags in the ground, hit some balls around it, and came up with a tight budget. But unfortunately, our routing would have necessitated a couple of long bridges over the ravines in the valley, and the bridges came in at $1.5 million, more than the rest of the construction put together, which killed the deal for now.
Someday, perhaps when I'm ready to retire, I want to revisit this one. You're about to see why.
Julian's original proposed site for The Lodge at Cape Kidnappers was on this point, overlooking Black Reef and the last bay around to Cape Kidnappers Point. It's a pretty iconic image, yet a lot of the resort guests never get to see it. Since the lodge site was shot down, I thought it might make a good site for our 17th green, above.
As at Black Forest, our idea for the routing was to play down into the property from above, and finish down below. This would have given us one of the most memorable first holes in golf, a long dogleg right over the corner of the ravine. Out in the water, in the distance, you can see the top of "the tooth" and you might even aim for it.
We would need a big bridge to get across the ravine for the par-3 second hole, and then there were several holes playing up an open paddock below the first tee, and back down again, before going up over a ridge. At the far end, there was a great natural par-3 waiting for us ... that's Bruce Hepner down on the green, planting the flag.
But this might have only been a place to hit an extra ball, because climbing back up out of that valley wouldn't have been much fun.
One other aspect of the course was that we had a couple of holes that would have made Charles Blair Macdonald blush. The first of them was the tenth, which I had already christened the "Southern Alps" hole. The tee was out on a narrow spit of ground, and the hole played across a rising paddock and then the second shot up through the notch in the far ridge ... probably 60 feet high ... to a green in a bowl halfway down the back side.
If that wasn't enough, my par-4 13th was a hole I don't think anyone would have argued over calling a "Cape" green. It was a dogleg left along the side of a steep hill ... the green stuck out into the loop of a deep creek, like this.
Working our way back over the two ravines to the water's edge would probably have been a bit of an anticlimax.