I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset.
When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my.
Ball in a brid Egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Friday, Frida Egg Egg, Fridagg Bride Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run.
Off of the Welcome back to another edition of the Friday Golf Podcast. I am your host, Andy Johnson. Uh. Today I am joined by Garrett Morrison. We are going to talk about his big trip a couple of weeks ago to the Great State of Maine. He went on a journey, played a ton of golf in Maine over the course of a week, and I think it's a pretty cool golf trip that nobody really talks about it talks about. I'm super excited to chat with Garrett about it. He's been wanting to do this trip for some time.
I've wanted to do the trip for some time and glad that a member of the Frida Egg staff got out there and finally did it. Before we get to Garrett, let's talk about our partner for this podcast, really a real partner.
We are.
I guess you could say we're in cahoots with good Walk Coffee. We have a couple blends. We have the Frida Egg Golf Blend and we have the Shotgun Start Blend. This is a great way. I am a happy subscriber to good Walk Coffee. I travel a lot. I get two bags a month sent to me. What I find great. I just had run out of coffee literally to the day, got my two new bags. What I love is I never have to go to the grocery store. I never am out of beans in a morning because I am
a subscriber to this coffee. We have a deal for you. If you use the promo code fried Egg, you'll save twenty percent off your entire first order. Now, if you start a coffee subscription like what I was just talking automatically gets sent to you. You guys can get the beans ground, you can get them full full beans. You'll save thirty percent on your first order, then ten percent on all future shipments. I find this to be a great, great way to get your coffee Listen, Coffee is what
gets you going in the morning. You don't want to not have it, and this is the best way to do that. So go to Goodwalkcoffee dot com slash fried Egg. Use the promo code fried Egg, and I would sign up for that subscription. The two blends are the fried Egg Blend, which is a light medium light roast that is what I drink personally, and then the shotguns start. If you're more of a dark roast coffee person, that's for you. So check that out. And thank you to
all that subscribe and support us with this coffee. All right, let's get to Garrett. All right, Garrett, I gotta ask amazing flight that you took. You went Portland to Portland.
I did. That's a feature of this trip for me, that I started in Portland, Oregon and went to Portland, Maine. It was not a direct flight.
Buttland to Portland directly. It seems out of principle there should be one.
It seems like it's an automatic kind of promo idea for some up and coming airline. But I have heard stories about people accidentally going to the wrong Portland. I heard a few of those stories while I was in Maine when I mentioned that I that I live in the other Portlands, as they call it in Portland, Maine. People do sometimes find themselves in Portland, Maine Portland, Oregon when they wanted the other one, which is quite a situation because they are not close to each other.
What how do how do port How does Portland, Maine differ from Portland, Oregon.
You know, in some ways, they're kind of similar. They're both these port towns, right, they're named after the fact that they're port towns, and they're they're kind of northern, and the you know, the landscapes are not totally dissimilar. Obviously, Portland, Oregon is is substantially bigger than Portland, Maine, and in general, Oregon is a more populous state than than Maine. So you feel like you're kind of out of the out
of the normal, you know, modes of city life. When you're in Portland, Maine, it doesn't feel like you're in a metropolis, whereas Portland, Oregon is a big city.
I think their golf scenes are a little different, right.
Yes, well, certainly, Maine's golf scene in general is very traditional, very old, very deeply rooted, whereas Portland, Oregon's golf scene, although we have a few old courses, is more new fangled, and that's that's part of the character of the states as well. Maine has been around for a long time has has been settled by Americans or Westerners for for quite a long time, whereas Oregon was part of the frontier,
and I think the golf kind of represents that. In Maine, it's very traditional and that's part of the reason that I was interested in going there.
Yeah, I think this trip has has been kind of like circled on the fried Egg editorial desire things that we've wanted to do for a long time as a company. I think like one of the biggest virtues of the trip was the accessibility of it. There aren't a lot of places where you can go play a bunch of Golden Age golf designs that are affordable, open to the public, and interesting. What I would I would I guess like, how did you like, how did you go about planning
this trip out? Because I think that's one of the challenges why it might be difficult to comprehend doing is like where do you start? How did you go about starting to plan this trip and decide what courses you were going to see and where you were going to stay. I think those are kind of initial hurdles.
Well, first of all, you said Golden Age accessible, Golden Age golf course designs. I would also say pre Golden Age golf courses are in abundance in Maine, and there are a lot of them that you can play just for a normal green fee, and it's a type of golf that you just don't see very often because a lot of the courses that were built before the Golden Age, before the nineteen tens and twenties in America were redesigned
in the nineteen tens, twenties and thirties. In Maine, a lot of those courses that were built in the eighteen nineties or the early nineteen hundreds haven't really been touched since then, and that's part of what makes them special. And so in planning the trip, I really focused on
seeing those golf courses, those old golf courses. There are some good modern courses in Maine, and I heard about those from various people that I would run into at these older courses where they would be like, are you going to Boothbay Harbor, Are you going to Sugar Loaf? Are you going to Belgrade Lakes? These are some of the modern courses that are well regarded in Maine, and I would tell them no, I think that where we're at right now is kind of cooler and what I
came to Maine to see. But that's not to say that those courses that I mentioned are not good. I think Boothbay Harbor especially is considered to be very good and looks very good. But I didn't go to Maine to see good modern golf. I went to Maine to go see something from the eighteen nineties that hasn't been redesigned since then. And so that is to me what
was special about this experience on primarily coastal Maine. There are also some courses inland in Maine, but coastal Maine is where I focused, because you got some courses right on the ocean that were built more than a century ago that are just there and where else can you find that? So I went to Maine to find something that I couldn't find anywhere else, and I was really satisfied in that expectation. So you know, in laying out
the trip, there were many different iterations of this. I had a huge list of courses that I could potentially have seen, and I ended up selecting ten of them, which was very hard to do.
So so the ten were and this probably will mean nothing to a lot of people because you won't know the names through them more thoroughly.
Yeah, well we'll talk about them.
Blank, Bonnie Golf Links, Grindstone Neck Golf Club.
Should I say them?
Yeah?
Yes, I know how to pronounce them, panob Scott Valley Country Club. I had to. I had to ask about the pronunciation of that one. They call it. They call it Panabi sometimes in Maine. Northeast Tarbor Golf Club, Cebo Valley Club, Mcgunta Cook Golf Club, Wahwanack Golf Course, Portland Country Club, Poland Spring Golf Course, and I think I might have skipped North Golf Club. Yeah, a lot of great names in there. First of all, Maine really knows how to name its golf courses.
A little bit naming well.
I think there's some some Native American influence on the names, and they're just wonderful sounding. You know where Mcgunta Cook, Like, where the heck does that come from? But in any case, those are the courses that I saw. A big help in planning this trip was Brian Schneider's itinerary from a couple of months ago. You had Brian on the podcast to discuss his experience in Maine, and you touched on it, but you didn't really go super in depth on it.
But Brian covered his trip to Maine in a really wonderful way on Instagram, and I was following those posts and keeping an eye on which courses he thought were really remarkable, and those ones kind of got an extra check mark in my book. But a lot of these courses have been on my personal map for a long time because it's just the type of golf that I want to see that I'm kind of obsessed with. You know, nine holers that are more than a century old. Yes,
please sign me up for that. So that's what I was focusing on, you know. Blake Conant also was a good resource here. He knows about these kinds of courses and has researched them. So ultimately I decided to spend a good deal of time in the region known as down East Maine. Now, to be clear, the coast of Maine moves mostly east, right, it moves northeast, but mostly east.
So the deeper part of Maine, when you get past Portland, which is kind of in the kind of southern or western part of the state and clos ish to Boston, it's not that hard to get to Portland from Boston. When you go farther into Maine, you get into a territory called down East Maine. This is where Acadia National Park is on Mount Desert Island. Beautiful out of the way places, not very heavily populated, though there are some
towns throughout. And this is the region where I spent a lot of my time because quite a few of the courses that I was really keenly interested in were in this region. So I spent what some people might think would be an unusual amount of time in this area. It would have been reasonable to spend an equal amount of time in the Portland area and seeing all those
golf courses around there. There are more golf courses there, and they're very interesting as well, but I just wanted to emphasize the Down East region, so I stayed there for a while, and then toward the end of the trip, I went into the Portland area, and I also saw a couple of places in what they call the Mid Coast region, which is kind of between the Portland area and the Down East region.
So that's about how far of a drive is it up to the Down East section from Portland.
Well, that's an interesting question because there are many different routes you can take, and not all the roads are super efficient.
Through me.
A few hours. It's basically to get to the Down East region, which is a big region, so it depends on where you're going within it. But to get from like Portland to Bangor, Maine, which is kind of the biggest city in the region that I'm discussing, third biggest city in Maine and approximately where Pinobscott Valley country Club is. To get from Portland to Bangor, believe, it's about two to two and a half hours of driving. The night that I got there, I got in late. I flew
in to the Portland airport pretty late. I got up early in Portland, Oregon, and by the time I got to Portland, Maine, it was, you know, nine ten o'clock, and I just relied on Google Maps, and I ended up just taking the craziest route to where I was going in the Downeast, like literally just taking country back roads completely pitch black, dark, no signs of civilization around, and I was on no road for longer than like five miles. So it was really it was really quite
a drive. I don't know if i'd recommend it, but that was I think the more direct route along the coast. If you're going along the coast, you're gonna do some interesting.
Driving interesting and then that middle area is kind of reachable from either of those two sections, i'd imagine, right.
Yes, yeah, the mid coast area where the main coastal cities as far as I know. Apologies if to geography nerds if this is wrong, but Rockport and Rockland, which are well named these because they're very rocky, those cities are in the mid coast region, and that's where mcgunta Cook Golf Club is, and that's where also I took the ferry to North Haven Golf Club from. So that's and while we'n not, golf courses is around that that region as well.
You talked a little bit about the pre Golden Age design, and then there's a number of Golden Age designs. What stands out about that pre Golden Age design, specifically in Maine and the types of golf that it yields versus the more refined Golden Age architecture in Maine specifically.
Pre Golden Age, what you get is very natural golf course design because they weren't spending much on constructing a golf course to an extent, they didn't really know how to construct a golf course, at least in the modern sense, and so the course of are just laid out on the land. The greens are very simple, and in Maine
you have a lot of rocks. Sometimes those rocks have not been removed from the fairways and so they actually create this kind of lenxy bumpiness, especially at Grindstone Neck Golf Club, which was designed by Alex Finley, I believe is a lot of the history of these courses. Of the architectural history is super hazy because it hasn't been researched
all that well. But Alex Finley was a, you know, one of the first wave of kind of Scottish American golf architects who built a lot of the first versions of courses that you know about. Grindstone Neck was his work, evidently, and it still is his work, and it's very very natural. What you'll also see in pre Golden Age design is
some stuff that might strike you as strange. Now, you know, greens that are completely blind from the approach, stone that are blocked by some kind of natural impediment that was not consider it a bad thing to do pre Golden Age. In fact, it was considered a good thing to do. Yeah, put a little kind of you know, obstacle right in front of the green. So these hazards that you had to carry carry hazards were not verbotant in this era as much as they became in the Golden Age and
in our current era of golf architecture. So you'll see strange stuff like that. You'll see some features that may not look totally natural to your eye, the chocolate drops and things like that. You know, features that were built to resemble Lynk's land but don't really completely resemble linksland that look obviously artificial. So you'll see some of that.
But in general, the main thing that strikes me about those kind of Victorian era or pre Golden Age golf courses is just their sheer naturalness because they did not spend much on constructing them.
That's state I think, like just in general, a different style of golf. Like one of the things that I stands out to me about this golf trip is just the immense variety that you could get in design styles, like different experiences, which it's cool, like if you were going to go on a food tour, for example, you wouldn't go just get all the same style of food. You'd go to a city or an area. You'd go to a food.
Truck, you'd go to the Michelin Star restaurant. Yeah.
Yeah, And I think that's the neat thing about this trip is the variety. Let's you know, let's stay a little general before we dive into some of the more you know, nitty gritty at the trip. Roughly, what are you looking at from a cost standpoint for this trip in terms of green spees courses, if you wanted to go pick off a couple of these, what was the kind of the range of greens fees and the accessibility of most of the courses.
You know, there was a pretty big range of green fees. You know, some of them were higher than I expected, and some of them were lower than I expected. But Blank Bonnie Golf Links is an outer box golf course. You put twenty five dollars in a mail slot and you can play all day. It's a nine hole golf course.
So that's kind of the low end. Right. Wahwaana Golf Course is a lovely public, everyday golf course that is very accessible that's around thirty to forty bucks for nine holes, and I believe there's a good deal for eighteen holes. The higher end of publicly accessible golf courses that I saw is more represented by Keebo Valley and especially Northeast Tarbor Golf Club. Northeast Tarbor is a very refined golf course.
One indicator for a main golf course that has a higher maintenance budget is that the fairways are irrigated.
That's great.
That's one quick and dirty way that you can tell, you know, because a lot of the courses that I saw the fairways are not irrigated, which I absolutely love, by the way, But Northeast Tarbor is extremely well maintained and a beautiful golf course with a good sense of place to It's not like it's sticking out from its setting more than the other golf courses, but it is
a more refined golf course. That green fee is more up in the two hundred dollars range, I believe, and it's only really public in the shoulder seasons during the summer. It's a member course. You can play it in those kind of pre summer and post summer months when the golf course is still playable. So that's the low end and the high end. So from Otter Box to Northeast Tarbor Golf Club is approximately the range, a pretty big range, but there's no five hundred dollar green fees out there.
In terms of must sees, is what we're like, the absolute this is, you know, the star of this trip, the stars.
The concept of must see is so tough when it comes to Maine because you know, I would say a place like Blink Bonnie is kind of a muss see because you just have to have the experience of going out and playing this kind of amateur architecture golf course with holes that literally cross over each other and putting money in an outer box. I think that's an experience
that you should have. But in terms of courses that are just at a very high level architecturally and important in that way, Keebo Valley comes to mind first and foremost. I think for a long time, Keebo Valley was considered the great course, the great course of the of the down East region of Maine, and it has a wonderful and pretty complicated architectural pedigree. But for a long time that has been kind of the course in the region and I think Northeast tarbor Is is up there with
it as well. So those are the those that's I think you have to if you go to this region, you have to go to Keebo Valley. That's the I think that's the number one UH must see on the list.
And just so so we're you know, you know, in terms of this trip, then with the shoulder season availability of Northeast Heart, it seems to me that, like right when you went is the ideal time to go.
I went right after Labor Day, and yeah, that's a good time to go. It's also a time when some clubs in the region, maybe not many of the courses that I played, but certainly Portland Country Club, a lot of those courses air rate right at Labor Day. And so if that's not something that's to your taste, I
don't personally really mind it that much. But if you would prefer to see the greens at their absolute highest level, then the last week of August might be the ideal time to go to Maine and probably the time when you're going to get the best weather. But I went the week after Labor Day and the weather was unbelievable. People kept telling me it was the best weather they had seen all year, and it almost literally couldn't have
been better. But I do think that in general, like so because you can see a place like northeast Tarbor, because a lot of the summer residents move out of Maine during or after Labor Day, it is a good idea to kind of go to Maine in September because you can access the courses a little more easily and you can kind of be free. What I would have liked to have done on this trip if I hadn't been doing it for professional reasons, is just go out and drive and kind of like if I see a
sign for a golf course, go play it. I think that would be a really wonderful way to do this golf trip, and you could definitely do that in mid to late September.
I would love to probably go to Katia National Park too.
That sounds like something like I think like one of the other appeals of this trip is like the idea of a family trip like this is very very doable, where you play a couple rounds of golf, you start to pick this off and you know it could be a part of the country where you say, I want to go back there over and over again, and you eventually cover the whole you know, great golf area of Maine, but you're doing it while, you know, while not burning capital in your household.
Yes, you know, it would be a great family trip because there's so much else to do, and for a family trip, I would recommend in the down East region staying in bar Harbor, which is the town where Kiba Valley is and Northeast Tarbor is about a fifteen minute drive away. Bar Harbor would is the resort town. It's the busiest resort town that I saw that would be a great place to stay. Rockport would be a good place to stay. Bangor is a beautiful town and the
University of Maine is just outside of it. And so those would be really good places to find a neat hotel or resort or something like that and stay with family. They would have plenty to do and you could go out and play some golf.
I wanted to ask what were the towns like, what was the what were the people like? You know, I think like people in the towns are play an intricate role and why people love going to the UK to play golf. I think, you know, a lot of American golf destinations. One of the things that you miss out on is that you're at a resort and you are like, I'm in this resort and I am here, and it's kind of like Disney World, where I don't get to
experience the culture and the essence of the area. What's the main like in terms of like, you know, I know you were busy with golf, but what was it like when you were in the town getting food, get you know, coffee, different you know, provisions, what what? What do you find you know, interesting about the towns and culture of the areas well.
I will say I wish I had been able to do more of this. I went to Dunkin Donuts more often than I would have liked. You know, no disrespect to Dunkin Donuts, but I sure, I'm sure there was a good local coffee shop and bangor that I could have gone to when I played Pinopscott Valley. But I
spent a lot of time on the golf courses. I was photographing the golf courses, putting the drone up, playing you thirty six holes a day the first couple of days I was there, So there wasn't a lot of time to explore the culture and the towns and things like that. But from what I did see, the towns are beautiful. The seaside towns are just the kind of charming seaside towns that you dream about, old fishing towns that have since kind of turned to tourism but still had
that feel of a town that's untouched by time. These are the kinds of places that you keep driving by over and over on your way to coastal golf courses in Maine, and so they're kind of just picturesque and beautiful and just what you want them to be. The people, and primarily I met people at the golf courses, the superintendents, the pros, the gms. That's who I would be talking to when I got to the golf courses. I reached out to the superintendents at every single course that I visited.
Didn't get to meet all of them, but and I would typically talk to a pro or talk to a GM. They were the best. They were amazing. They were so excited to show off their golf courses. They were so full of information and so full of passion for what they were doing at their golf courses committed to the old style of golf that these courses represent. Kevin Conley at Grindstone Neck immediately comes to mind. Just a down
to earth guy who maintains Grindstone Neck. Is the superintendent there and also the primary contact, you know, if you want to make a tea time you can kind of just get in touch with him and things like that. He was so welcoming and had such great ideas about
what he was doing at this golf course. He's a superintendent who has worked at some high level clubs in his past, and Grindstone Neck is in the area where he grew up, and so he just moved there and is now maintaining that golf course in exactly the way that it needs to be maintained. And it was lovely to meet him, and I think of him as kind of a representative of a lot of the golf course
people I met in Maine. They were some of the most impressive and friendliest people that I've met on any golf trip.
When you say maintained the way it should be maintained, what does that mean?
No irrigation in the fairways, nice and firm in late summer and just very simple. The fairways are super wide, right, there's not like a defined contour to the mowing lines of the fairways like you see at a lot of modern courses in a corridor that's open or that shares holes. It's just mown out and it's it's very simple, straight lines and there are two primary cuts that are used.
There's not all these all these intermediate cuts. It's very straightforward maintenance and the nature along the sides of the holes is completely intact. It is exactly what it looks like if you were to take a hike through Acadian National Park or whatever other park in this region. It's not the golf course is not fighting its setting. It's just sitting there. And yes, this approach to maintenance can
can have some drawbacks when it rains. I'm sure that a place like Grindstone Neck or Blink Bonnie or Kuba Valley can get a little bit soggy because there's not a whole lot of high tech drainage infrastructure to dry off the golf course. There's no subair under the greens. I'm sure whatever the weather rains is what the golf bears.
Yeah twenty years, yeah, yeah.
I'll be all be have historical renovations done right as they as they say. So, yeah, that's the I was there during a good Weathereriod during a druy period. It's great. I'm sure. If it's rainy then yeah, you're you're roughing it a little bit.
If you send If we send too many people on this trip, then they'll have money to do the historical renovations.
Well, that's that's what I sort of fear. Maybe we shouldn't publish this podcast.
So we've talked a little bit about some of the golf courses. I wanted to do kind of some superlatives here. What was the best value? And I'm going to take Blake Bonnie the twenty five dollars all day, because we've already talked about that's cheating. Yeah, we're gonna take that one out of it because we've already talked about it.
Gosh, the best value is a little tricky. I would say probably Wawanak golf course. This is a Wayne Styles course. Okay, So Wayne Styles is a Golden Age era architect who worked a lot in Maine. You see a lot of golf courses designed by Styles and Van Cleek in this region. His partner during the nineteen twenties was John Van Cleek. Styles also did some well known courses in New England,
including Taconic and farther toward Portland. In Maine, Proutsneck Country Club is very well regarded a course that I did not see on this trip. They're not particularly interested in coverage and so that was a big reason that I didn't go to it. But there are many accessible, public, affordable Wayne Styles golf courses that you can see in Maine and in the neighboring states. Is one of those golf courses.
What would you Yeah, I think like Styles Van Cleek to me would be like the underrated seventies rock band that has a lot of good songs but nobody really knows about. Yeah, I don't know what the rake comp would be for that, but that's how I would describe them, you know.
Right, Yeah, they're they're the they're the hidden indie band at this point, and you're you're proud to wear the T shirt. But you know, maybe in a few years they're going to be a little bit overexposed. They'll get signed by a major label and people will think they're they're a
bit passe. But yeah, I mean that, you know, Styles is one of those names that golf architecture nerds kind of whisper to each other, and you know, in a sense, it's sort of like where Langford and Moreau was before you completely overexpose them and ruin them.
Andy right, I don't think they're ruined at all.
There's Langford and Moreau is amazing. This is what people say.
There's sometimes about our coverage of more awareness.
There's more awareness around, more understanding of Langford and Moreau. I wouldn't say that Wayne. What I saw of Wayne Styles on this trip would make me think that he was an architect on the level of William Lankford, especially when it comes to the internal contouring of greens. Styles as greens, as far as I could see, were pretty simple. There are some interesting things going on at the exteriors of his greens, the way he kind of builds up
the shoulders against slopes. There is kind of a Wayne Styles signature there that you can see at courses like Wahwanack and North Haven. But in general, I'm not going to beat the drum for Wayne Styles as loudly as I might for Langford and Morow though I think that Styles and Van Kleek were very good routers of golf courses and their natural approach to golf architecture is something that I really appreciate and enjoy. So whenever you see that Styles has designed a course, go seek it out.
And in a place like Wamanach, you're going to pay the thirty dollars or something for nine holes somewhere around there, and that's hard to come by anywhere.
There's a ton of nine hole courses. What's the reasoning for the propensity of nine holes? I have a theory, but you know, I'm curious if you know anything.
Well, I want to hear your theory. Here's mine. It's simply that main golf courses often did not have the
funds or the reason to expand to eighteen holes. So when they were established in the late eighteen nineties as nine hole courses, as many courses across the country were, they did not then have the reason in the nineteen teens and twenties to expand back to to expand to eighteen holes, bring in another architect to redesign the nine holes and add another nine holes, as so many courses did later on.
Yeah, I think it's I agree with that. I think you see a lot of nine holers in the rural Midwest, or nine holers that were designed in the twenties and thirties and then they were, as you said, expanded and renovated. It often ruined. You know, David Gill comes to mind as just a hit man. And there's the worst thing you can you can the worst thing you can see is a gil a gil a Gill credit to the design. You know that some bad stuff happened at that old
school golf course. So I would agree with that. I think like a lot of these towns, like I think it's like kind of telling and maybe something that a lot of municipalities, a lot of towns that have golf courses that might not be that popular should consider as like, would we be more popular? Do we really only need nine holes from a maintenance, from a land use like it's like and I think there's I think, like, honestly, a lot of days, I think nine holes is the right amount of golf.
Especially now that pace of play is what it is. When you hear about how people played the game. In the early days, eighteen holes was considered to be a two and a half hour to three hour pursuit that's no longer how we see it. And so nine holes certainly does into people's days a lot better than eighteen holes, and it can become part of your everyday life. Place like Grindstone Neck, a place like mcgun to cook Golf Club or Wawanak can just be there for you on
a weekday. And that's the beauty of it. And I think also architecturally speaking, a lot of properties have the ability to contain nine good holes. Yeah, but not eighteen.
I mean you see it so often, like you hit a dull stretch of land, you like.
Just chop this off right, yeah, you know, yeah.
Or you see something like a hole that would be better as one hole that's two holes. Yeah, you see that all the time. Or you see like a congested area that it's like, oh, if we got rid of some of these holes, it would be better. Back to the main question is quite superlatives. Sure, what was the most unique experience?
No doubt North Haven Golf Club. This was my favorite experience on the trip. Might have been my favorite golf course, though Portland Country Club was by far and away the best golf course that I saw on this trip, no doubt about it. I loved Portland Country Club, but as a full experience, there's nothing like north Haven Golf Club that I've experienced before. You get on a ferry in Rockland, Maine, seaside town, and you spend an hour riding on that
ferry out to this little island. It's kind of like a chain of islands out there. There are a few different ones. The town of north Haven is where this ferry took me. I took my golf clubs along with me. Was literally carrying my golf clubs on the ferry. Got off the ferry at the dock in north Haven and walked to the golf course. You can take your car with you if you want, but you have to reserve it. It costs a little more money and the golf course is pretty close to town.
So you just saw he took I got off of the ferry and walked with your clubs there.
That's right. It was amazing. It was about a fifteen to twenty minute walk and I got out there and it was just what you would imagine. It's a country golf course. There are a few people there who work in the shop and maintain the course. I ran into the president of the club who was going out at about the same time that I was such friendly, again, down to earth people. It was great to talk to them. And this course is just what I'm looking for when
I'm going to Maine. It is on the crest of this hill sort of, so a lot of the fairways run on side slopes, either on one side of the peak of the hill or the other side, and it is incredibly wide. These are not tree lined corridors. There are trees around the golf course, but they never they never planted trees on this golf course. This is again one of the things that's a blessing about not having the funding to make changes to golf courses after they're built.
They never had the money to do a tree planting beautification program. So in the core of this golf course it is untried and these fairways just connect to each other. It's a big sloping field that you're playing golf on, and that the way that the holes use this land is very clever and very sophisticated. It was designed by
Wayne Styles in nineteen thirty two. So actually, as as the courses I saw on this trip go, this was a fairly recently built golf course nineteen thirty two is actually not not before a depression?
Yeah, like what are the last want?
Right? Yeah, this was just as things were kind of shutting down. You know, you saw a few courses being built in America in the early thirties, but then as it became clear what the circumstances were.
The only courses were being built in the depression were oil oil towns, Perry Maxwell getting work in the Oklahoma and the oil hubs.
Yeah, that's right. It'scummy Perry Maxwell taking the oil money.
Different different kind of oil money than today's oil money.
That's right. This is not a sovereign wealth fund North Haven, So that's kind of the vibe of the golf course. Then it has this one hole that's out on the coast. You walk from the fifth green through this little path that goes through a tunnel of trees, and then you arrive at this tea that's right on the ocean, and you play a little par three that goes over this tiny cove to a green that's set on this kind
of spit of land that extends out. I think if they were to remove the trees along the left side of this hole. There are trees between the hole and the ocean. If they were to remove those trees, and I'm not saying that I think they should, because that tree removal takes money and I'm not expecting a course like this to spend a lot of money on a
course renovation. But if these trees somehow just went away, say they were knocked down in a storm, this would be a much more famous golf course because of this hole. But in any case, you play that hole and you go back inland, and I think, really the great holes at this golf course are the ones along these slopes. They you know, it's one of those courses. It's I don't want to make an unfair comparison, but like the old course at Saint Andrew's, you stand on a tee
and you're not looking out at a defined hole. You have an awareness of where the green is and your task is to get across the land to that green. But the way the holes are set up does not give you directions about how to do that. And there's something to me so pleasurable about that, and that's why I enjoyed north Haven so much, and just the experience of being out on the island. You know, you're kind of out there for the day. It takes a day to take this trip. That that's the that's the thing
that's difficult about it. I almost didn't take this trip because I was like, do I really want to spend one day basically seeing one golf course when I'm spending every other day seeing three, maybe even four golf courses. But it was totally worth it, and I'd recommend it. You end up taking the ferry back at about three forty five pm, so you're just.
So people live out there in the summer.
People more people, far more people live out there in the summer than live out year round, but there there are locals who are there year round as well. And when I was waiting for the ferry, I got back to the town about an hour hour and a half before the ferry left, and I just sat there and waited for the ferry, obviously, and.
In the shops with your golf clubs.
Well, it's just set the golf clubs out on the street and left them there because I was like, nobody's taken these. It's an experience that you don't have very often in modern life, where you're just waiting around for something and there's not really there's shops with internet and stuff like that, but it's not something that you're thinking about doing, like looking at your phone or it's always
just kind of being there. And there are these local kids who are playing a game of hide and seek around the downtown area, like running into shops and asking the shopkeepers if they could hide behind the counters and things like that. And so I just got I got a little sense of what that local life is because a lot of the summer residents had left by the time I was there. Again, people leave around Labor Day, and it was a beautiful experience. I loved it, and I want to do it again.
All right, let's uh, now you got the most most unique experience set? Yeah, which course do you feel like has the most potential?
Penobscot Valley Country Club? Donald Ross design legit Donald Ross Design. The way the routing works in and out of the corners of this property is definitively Donald Ross. Is not one of those courses that he spent a day pointing at things at he designed. This golf course has a really good set of grains, looks and feels like a Donald Ross golf course on a very very good piece of land. This club. This course absolutely screwed itself. About twenty five years ago, they decided to build a big
iceore of a clubhouse. It was a private club at this point, and the clubhouse, apparently, from what I heard, bankrupted the club. It is just a wonderful representative story about something that happens pretty commonly and shouldn't happen. The course became public after that got purchased by a golf course operator that was mainly regional, and this operator decided to renovate the golf course. They called it a restoration
in the late two thousands. They did the renovation right around two thousand and seven, and I think you already know where this story is going. The renovation wasn't very good. They did some weird things with the bunkers. I'm not sure why they did those things. They kind of made them me look like these wavy edged modern bunkers. Yeah, super bright white sand does not look like anything Donald Ross ever built. Donald Ross never constructed little frilly wavy edges.
They made this decision to build these bunkers. They added some bunkers. It was not really a faithful historical project. Of course, the recession hit and this operator seems to have tried to divest itself of a lot of its golf courses around this time, and it seems to me that the club was in no place to maintain these new little fancy bunkers, and the edges of them have literally caved in over the years. So they used to
be these these fancy, little fiddly edges. Now they're just like these raw walls that have caved in because of weather and other factors, and just the fact that they don't seem situated to maintain anything that takes intensive maintenance. And so I actually kind of like the look of the bunkers now. They look to me this is this is sort of an esthetic choice that that I would sort of endorse. But I don't think they're very easy
to maintain right now. I think they're problematic for the maintenance team at the course, and they're starting to be overgrown. A lot of them have kind of thick weeds growing in them. This is a struggling course that has been neglected, that has been treated poorly, that has really wonderful, authentic Donald Ross bones. It's gonna be a fantastic golf course and the land is truly very very good, especially on the back nine. Wonderful up and down undulation to the
land while still being quite walkable. There's even a semi volcano hole. All sorts of stuff out there that people would love. It needs, it needs a bit of TLC, but it needs the it needs the right kind of TLC.
Just just seems small, just like a like a superintendent that gets super into it and can make some you know, do some stuff in the in the shoulder seasons right.
And has it has a proper budget and team, which is not easy in Maine because the season is so short. But it seems like they could do something there for sure, because it's not This is not a a hard luck kind of town. This is a university town. I'm sure there are there's a community that could support this course
in its in its recovery. But as it is very fun to play, I didn't mind anything about the kind of shabby conditioning of it, but I could see where it would be hard for the course to control what was going on, especially in some of the.
All right, one another question, sure, best golf course, And then the second part is which course would you play the most if you were if it was near you could take any of them, put them right in your backyard. Effectively.
Best golf course is Portland Country Club. I mentioned that before, another Donald Ross design. This one extremely well taken care of, but well taken care of in a way that I completely approve of. Ron Pritchard and Tyler Ray have been doing historical work there for about the past decade and they have done an absolutely terrific job. This course still
feels old. They did not rebuild the greens. The greens are what they have always been and what they should be, and it is a wonderful, wonderful set of Donald Ross greens, one of the best set of Donald Ross greens I think I've seen on a very beautiful seaside piece of land. And there are kind of two main areas of this course. One is by the bay, Casco Bay, and the other is kind of back in the woods, and both pieces of land have something going for them. There's good land
movement throughout. The routing is pitch perfect, a lot of great golf holes. This is a strong, strong golf course. I think a lot of people consider it the best course in Maine, and I can see where that assessment comes from. What course would I play? The most, I'd probably go with courses that I've mentioned already. Grindstone Neck would be one that I could play every day and be very happy about. Simple seaside golf, absolutely beautiful, so
interesting and natural. Keebo Valley is I'd love to have Keebo Valley as my local course. I can't believe the luck of people who live in bar Harbor a year round and just get to play that golf course North Haven. As I've already mentioned, I adore. The one that I haven't mentioned though, that would be a great candidate for playing every day is mcgunta Cook Golf Club. One of the craziest courses I've ever seen. Andy Well was.
Crazy about it.
Well. I don't know a lot about its architectural history. It seems like it was designed primarily by a greenkeeper initially in the early early nineteen hundreds, and then a landscape architect completed the course. I believe it's a nine hole course. Private club completed the course in the early nineteen tens a landscape architect whose name I have not seen before. And so this golf course feels as though and this is a compliment, feels as though it was
designed by somebody who doesn't know anything about golf. That's a compliment because it is so utterly distinctive. I've never seen anything like it. The most obvious place to go in try to portray how unique this golf course is is the three holes number four, number seven, number eight that have greens that are literally set behind or set on massive rocky ledges or formations. The fourth hole is a short part three where what you see from the tee is a big rock formation coming out of the ground.
The green is on the other side of it, completely invisible. This is about one hundred yard hole. That's what the hole is. The eighth hole might be the wildest golf hole I've seen ever. Maybe the green is literally perched on top of a forty foot high pile of rocks, just sitting there on top of a huge pile of rocks coming out of the ground. I think it's natural. I think I don't think they just pushed a bunch
of rocks together. So it's that kind of course. Just you know, you could say it's a Victorian architecture in the sense that there are barriers between the approach zone and the green. This is something that golf architects would sometimes do in the era before the Golden Age, this was considered an interesting and fun way to challenge people's golfing abilities to have these carries. But talk about a course that uses what it's got. That property has rocks.
This golf course really emphasizes that the rocks are the hazard. There's one bunker on the entire course and it's on the ninth hole, and it's actually I think they could probably get rid of it. So that's what this course is. It uses the rocks on its property and it's wild. I don't I don't even know how to begin describing what this architectural philosophy is, because I think it's one of.
One that's amazing.
All Right.
So we've talked a lot about this trip, a lot of the What were a couple courses that you that you missed that you want to do the next time you go to Maine.
Well, I should. I haven't talked about I didn't talk about Poland Spring, which is the last golf course that I saw. Also a very worthy, beautiful golf course with views of the bodies of water where they drew the Poland Spring water from. You know, Poland Spring water you ever had poland spring water. Yeah, they sell this all over Maine and it's a main company. And this golf course is basically on a mountain above this valley. It's really beautiful and there are a couple of greens that
were designed by Walter Travis. I think they've been softened over time. But it's funny you go around this golf course, you can immediately tell which greens Walter Travis built because it's so completely obvious. So that was a really fun experience to see that golf course as well. Also a very accessible course, affordable green fee on a resort that's been there since the late seventeen hundreds. I wish I had more time to explore the resort campus. But it's
a kind of a wild place. Looks like it may may have been a commune at some point. It feels like, you know, the people who stayed there might have had some weird religious ideas. Potentially it could be that kind of place. So another fascinating place in Maine, about forty five minutes outside of Portland. Golf courses that I missed were were many. There were many golf courses I missed.
I just scratched the surface on this trip a couple of golf courses that maybe aren't super interested in coverage, and I wanted to go see golf courses that I could tell people about and that the courses were excited to have me tell people about them. But Casting Golf Club, Old Willie Park course up in the down East region, really cool looking place. Prattsnet Country Club again one of those courses that's put up as a potential best course
in Maine. Candidate Wayne Style's golf course right on the coast. Abenaki Golf Club another coastal golf course, a very very old vintage that looks really interesting. On the more public side of golf courses, I wish I had seen Island Country Club, another down East Island golf course that you don't have to take a ferry out to it, but
I really would have loved to see that. There are a variety of old clubs in the greater Portland area that I didn't get to because I chose not to spend as much time in Portland and in the Portland area as I could have. But there are many many cool club golf courses there that are accessible to the public. Riverside Golf courses Portland's municipal Course, and I wish I had seen that. I would like to go back and see that. I believe it's a Wayne Styles golf course,
and it is. It's the local muni. And so lots of lots of courses that I wish I had seen. Those are just a couple that maybe top the list. I didn't explore much inland Maine golf. You know, the farthest Inland I went was Panabscott Valley and then Poland Spring, and so there were many opportunities for interesting golf in the more mountainous and forested parts of Maine. You could spend plenty of time exploring those courses as well. And
that's the thing about Maine golf. I'd still to this day, I occasionally run across the name of a course that looks really interesting that wasn't on my list and is just in a random little town in Maine and has nine holes and it's designed apparently by Alex Finley or something like that, And I'd like to go see that golf course, but I'd have to spend a lot longer in Maine than I actually.
You got to move from one Portland to the other Portland.
Now, that would be a story. The Portland to Portland flight is one thing, but the Portland to Portland move would be That would be a book.
All right, Garrett, You're gonna have a lot more about this trip on on the website, our website, the Frida Egg dot com, as well as in CLUBTFE and I'm assuming on socials. So looking forward to seeing more and more seeing some of the visuals. And thank you for coming on to tell everybody about a great value trip that very few people think about.
I hope people enjoyed hearing about this. Let us know if you enjoy this kind of episode. Andy did one recently with Matt about his trip to Nebraska, which sounds wild. There was a point at which I was thinking about going with Matt on that trip, but I'm kind of glad I didn't, because only a man in his mid twenties as Matt is could have survived the amount of golf that he that he played and saw.
Packed it in.
He really backed it in, but obviously he saw a lot of amazing stuff and it was great to hear about it from my perspective. But if you like this kind of episode where we kind of do a portrait of a region of golf, then let us know, give us a shout and say if you like this kind of episode, because obviously we enjoyed doing them. This is the kind of golf that we love playing and talking about, and we hope that everybody out there likes it.
Too, all right, thanks Garrett. Today's episode was edited and produced by PJ Clark. Big thanks to PJ. As I mentioned at the end of the podcast, there a lot more details about this trip will happen in Club TFF. This is our membership. This is a place that we put a lot of time in producing content and we think if you enjoyed this podcast, you probably enjoy Club TFF.
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