I've noticed from my "worst holes" thread that nearly any time I've built a hole around an artificial water feature, it's been panned as one of my worst ... 8 at Sebonack, 16 at Black Forest, 18 at High Pointe.  To some extent, I would have to agree -- although I think that some people are so blind they won't accept ANY hole around inland water as possibly being good, which is ridiculous.

I don't remember anyone here ever talking about WHY holes around water are hard to pull off, so I thought I would try.

The primary thing I don't like about manmade ponds is that they all look alike, and they all look unnatural.  I can't believe that other architects want to build them as often as they do, but sometimes it's inevitable that they must be present.

The water surface itself has to be flat, and I'm not a big fan of flat in general, but there's nothing you can do about that ... so the only place to make a pond look natural is around the edges, by shape or by vegetation around the banks.

If you've got the room, one idea would be to make the pond in a ridiculous, convoluted shape that looked like no one would build it.  But that's hard to do because so many other people get involved in making a pond.  You don't just go out and shape it:  

- The town usually wants to know exactly how big it's going to be in the permit process.
 
- Engineers have to get involved, so that if the pond leaks it's not the architect's fault.
 
- There are regulations about the banks in the water having a "safety shelf" so a kid who wades in won't drown ... and a safety shelf is harder to build if there are a lot of ins and outs along the edge.
 
- The golf course superintendent and irrigation designer want the pond to have as much capacity for irrigation as possible, and major wiggles around the edge of the pond give up storage.

- You can't build much of a dam on the low side of the pond without going through more stringent regulations about the possibility of a dam burst, so ponds tend to be built below natural surface grade, which means you will have to rip up all the native vegetation just above water level in order to do the grading work.

- The engineers are going to have a bunch of guidelines for protecting the banks above the waterline from erosion, even though existing ponds rarely have major erosion issues.

- The environmental groups are going to insist that most of the linear footage around the bank include wetland vegetation for habitat, and in those areas you won't be able to play from the edge of the water (or, sometimes, tell if a close shot is playable or not).

So, there's the problem in a nutshell.  If anybody has a great idea of how to overcome these obstacles, I'm all ears.

Mr Doak:

Do people pan these holes because of shot values, or because of the way they look? Seems to me that most of the questions you pose have a lot to do with aesthetics, and that the critics must be emphasizing that rather than shot values.

The most complained about hole at my home club in Chicago, Sunset Ridge, was the 15th, a par three over an artificial pond. Complained about so much that it had been substantially redesigned four times. Sunset is an otherwise pretty well settled and quite nice classical parkland course--the first course (1924) Bill Diddel designed outside of his native Indiana. Not a great course, but a very fine amateur's course, which, like Diddel, is notable particularly for longevity and consistency.

The pond wasn't there when Diddel designed the course--just a stream.  It was built when artificial irrigation came in.

The hole has been called: awkward, too hard, unnatural, inconsistent with the rest of the course, ugly, unfair, boring (it's not imo because it's hard), a bottleneck, challenging, etc. etc. Yet I thought it pretty good because there was a safe and an agressive way to play it, and you could choose based on your skill, the pin, the wind, the status of the match and how you felt that day. Though it wasn't beautiful because the pond was clearly artificial, I thought it was the one great hole on the course because there were so many ways to play it, and it put on a lot of pressure at a crucial time in a round.

The hole has now been renovated again, and I'll see the renovation for the first time next week, as I now live in SC and am a nonres member. The idea was to make the hole more fair, but from what I hear it has also reduced the options and the possibilities for disaster--a shame.

But it will look nicer.

I'll be interested in looking at it through the filter of the questions you pose.

Then I'll down a couple of magic 'shrooms and see what it really looks like.

You bring up and interesting point. I can't remember ever seeing a large manmade pond that looks natural. Honestly my favorite is at TPC Sawgrass where there was no attempt to make it look natural at all.

My only suggestion would be to get some irregular kidney shape and add a buffer of fine fescue. Then on the outside edge make the fescue vary in width and come out closer to the golf hole in some areas and narrower towards the lake. But when you look across the lake you see the hard line between the fescue and ponds edge. So no I don't really have any plausible suggestions.  

I would like to see an architect try to utilize a creek system, where it replaces the usual irrigation pond with burn-like creeks on several holes, creating enough water area to make it both interesting and tasteful, yet challenging. Certainly a well placed creek is anything but flat in terms of where it is and what goes on around it. I also don't think you need rocks and other fauna to cover it up either.

Perhaps the way this thread should go to achieve Tom's desired effect is for all of us to name holes with water hazards in the form of ponds, lagoons, marshes, etc. (everyone seems to love a creek, however) that are well integrated into a hole from both an aesthetic and functional perspective and then try to explain why we think they work, or why the are different and distinctive.

I'll start.  

The 436 yard (398 from the tee most play) par four 12th hole at the Jack Nicklaus designed Bayside Golf Club in southern Delaware is one of 18 holes that include water hazards on a lowland course built close to a tidal bay.  Some of them work rather well, such as this one.

The 12h hole has a water hazard extending essentially tee to green on the dogleg left.  The part closest to the tee seems to be an extension of a natural marsh, and your drive needs to carry a very small portion of it before the hazard swings back to the left and parallels the left side on the dogleg left hole down through the driving zone.  At about 200 yards from the back tee, there are a few tall trees left right at the edge of the pond.

At 315 yards from the back tee, the hazard cuts across the fairway, and is pleasantly appealing visually with some natural vegetation growing  within it and no sharp edges.  From there is continues up the right side of the hole to the green and beyond, progressively turning from open water to marshland.

This water hazard works well because there are choices to be made on each shot and because of the diagonal nature of the use of the hazard, as well as the natural appearing integration of the natural features with the unnatural ones (the golf hole, essentially).  On the drive, there is plenty of room to bail out away from the hazard on the right, but that leaves a much longer, awkward carry on the approach, to an elevated green built to receive a shot working left to right (again, back towards the hazard), and a steep falloff to the left of the green down to a bowled short game feature, where a recovery shot is very concerned with not blowing over and back into the hazard.

A drive that is aggressive and confronts the hazard on the left leaves a shorter iron (140 to 170 or so),which is what is really needed to approach the elevated green.   Even there, however, one must be concerned because getting a ball up high plays into what is often a stiff, prevailing left to right wind where balls can be tossed blithely back to the right and into the hazard, although two low-lying pot bunkers well below the surface of the green and just a few feet from the hazard might "save" you.  

However, whether your approach shot is from the shorter left or longer right, what makes this hole work for everyone is the fact that although there is water from tee to green, the only forced carry is perhaps the 20 or so yards of marshy hazard that intersects the fairway where the hole turns.  One can always elect to play left and short of the green where there is a generous, but interestingly and highly contoured area, also protected by a bunker about 60 yards short of the green.  From there, it's a funkily awkward little pitch, but the kind of shot that can be accomplished by anyone, yet still give a better player room for pause and confusion on exactly what type of shot to hit.

So there you have it.  436 yards of water hazard, only a few yards of forced carry, optional choices on all shots, continuing interest in how to factor in the wind, a green that is well designed to maximize the effect of the successes of pulling off those options, and a hole that can be played by anyone.  It also helps that at no point is there a jarring visual transition between land and water.

   

Tommy:  I am not sure how to answer your question in the terms you asked it.

Engineering for some new golf courses is getting to be a very expensive part of the equation.  The more complex it is, obviously, the more it costs.

Actually digging a pond doesn't cost too much ... that pond at Sebonack, for example, required about 20,000 cubic yards of excavation and we moved most of the earth to somewhere close by.  It would have been MUCH more expensive if we'd gotten down into the water table.  Lining the pond with PVC and then covering it with a foot of earth to prevent breakdown from exposure to light ... maybe another $50,000.

Mike C:  Your approach on describing good examples of water holes may help.  However, I think one of the main issues here is how can one successfully integrate one or two water holes into a course that is not about water, and have it belong?  On a flat site where there is water on every hole, it's not as hard for the water holes to belong.  I can design the golf holes okay -- Tommy's complaint about the 8th at Sebonack isn't because it's not a demanding hole, he just thinks it's out of place because there is a pond there.

Tom,
 
It seems to me that a pond or artificial lake is often featured because it looks good in promotional material, as a signature hole or whatever. Probably gives the hole more definition in the two dimensional photos in magazines, on the website, etc. On TV, water shows up well and how many courses we see feature water on the 18th with a high risk approach on a green sticking out into the pond? It looks good on TV.

They can also be necessary as a reservoir, for irrigation, etc. and so an architect can be faced with either hiding them, or if they must be in play, then you are faced with the practical problems you mentioned at the start of this thread, all of which are real. It is very difficult to make a pond look natural when faced with the factors you mention. Less so if you are making your way adjacent to a natural lake or a shoreline.

The Olympic Lakeside course in SF has no water and neither does another classic, Shaughnessy in Vancouver.  There is only the one pond at Bandon, on Bandon Trails and I gather that hole has not been well received. Scottish links course have no ponds but do have the burns, some creeks.

So my comment is that the problems with modern water holes would make me want to avoid them, keep them out of view if possible or not a feature. You do not need them. If they are dictated or necessary for drainage,etc. then it will always be a challenge to make it look natural and not contrived.

Bob J:  You are right that most course owners think their water hole is very special.  High Pointe features their 18th prominently in brochures; the local magazine came out a month ago to take my picture there and I had to insist that we go to a different hole to pose.  Tumble Creek has some gorgeous views, but the main picture I saw in some golf magazine was of our man-made ponds on #15.

Paul T:  The pond hole at Bandon Trails actually works quite well.  They kept it out of sight and out of mind on the tee shot, and when you get down to the green, they've got all those trees on the wooded bank on the far side.  I know Bill was not thrilled with having to build a pond hole at all but I think he did much better with it than I usually manage.

Tom,

At Tumble Creek the only holes that really seemed out of place were 14, 15, and 16.
I did like them but they were not in the same quality as other holes on the course.

It was like going through a forest where everything looked like it meant to be there toa couple holes that seemed more unnatural than the rest of the course.  Like I said, its not that I didnt like the holes, it was that they didnt fit in with the course, almost didnt belong amidst the other holes.
Did the owner of the course ask you to build those ponds?  If not, what prompted you to put them there?
Not tying to be a jerk just asking..

Tom,

I'm sure my aesthetic points were simplistic and probably pretty obvious, as well, but I think the idea of a water hazard sort of disappearing (blending, if you will) into a natural area is what makes some of the best water hazards I've seen work aesthetically.

With timing being everything, I just stole the following Aidan Bradley picture from the Hunter Ranch thread, but I think it's illustrative of what i'm getting at.  I can't tell if the water hazard pictured below is natural or man-made (although some shaping was obviously done on the fairway side of the hazard), but that's sort of the point.   If you can't tell...if it blends in well into native surroundings at some point in its overall area, then they can be an asset visually, as well as strategically.  This one sort of sneaks in and out of a wooded area on the right, forming a neat little cove on the back end.  



In looking at it, my only complaint might be that the right side bank could be a little less abrupt and that slope could possibly be flattened a bit and lengthened further out into the native area.

Ulrich,

Agreed that your pictures drive the point of how a pond can look quite natural through integration with surroundings but I'd be surprised to hear that any of them are totally man-made.

Tom D. — I agree with your fine list. It is always a difficult task to balance taste with the "lakes" as we call them here in the arid West.

A few of the posted pictures here are excellent examples of natural settings. It takes, of course, the right terrain. I suppose one can argue that if water was intended to be in the terrain ..... it would already be there!

Here is one solution...don't worry about it being natural. I consider this my latest tribute to Desmond

Jim, Skunk Cabbage?

Don't say that too loud, I don't want the powers to be telling me I have to have at least two cups of skunk cabbage for every meal, replacing romaine!

Tom, I think you more or less nailed it. My concern was more of how much would it cost to build a creek for water retention as compared to building a pond to do the same. I know which I would like better!