Prince Charming
East of northern Maine, north of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island floats like a crumpled fedora in the Northumberland Strait. With its sloping red-dirt farmland and intricately varied coastline, the island, named for Queen Victoria's father, seems to have been created with golf in mind. In fact, it has become something of a north-country golf mecca: There are 31 courses on the island. None is strictly private. And, shades of Bethpage State Park and Torrey Pines, the best places to play are owned and operated by the provincial government.
Everyone seems to agree that the Links at Crowbush Cove, a Thomas McBroom design that opened in 1993, takes first honors. Although it's only a 30-minute ride from the Charlottetown airport, Crowbush feels remote. It sits on a spectacular piece of seaside property, just west of Shipwreck Point, past the potato and timothy hay fields and the steep-roofed, neatly kept farmhouses. Bald eagles and blue herons glide above the spruce, pine, larch and white birch trees, and lesser yellowlegs scoot and squeal on the beach. What golfers will notice most of all is the wind.
Map: John Burgoyne
I played on a day in late June, when the course was not crowded, the grass still showed one or two winter scars, and the wind whistled in the trees with gusts of more than 30 miles per hour. The opening shot was over a good-size pond into the wind. I was standing indecisively at the white tees with my just-barely-single-digit handicap and fickle-of-late driver when Ryan Garrett, general manager of the provincial golf properties, happened by. "I think you ought to move back a set," he said, indicating the 6,600-yard golds.
I glanced at the scorecard again -- 144 Slope Rating from that distance -- and listened to his words fly over my shoulder toward the weathered gray-shingle clubhouse, and I thought, OK. No problem. What I probably should have been thinking was, Pride goeth before a fall.
The 144 Slope seems like an exaggeration for the first few holes in spite of the energetic gusts, the moguled, bunker-freckled fairways, and greens that buck and tilt like the ocean. Even the gradually narrowing 567-yard fifth with a third shot over water was manageable (especially if you avoid the steep bunkers that require a ladder to get in and out).
And then the course turns toward the sea.
The sixth, seventh and eighth holes all ask for long carries over marsh or pond, then Crowbush wanders away from the water for a while on the back nine, only to return with a vengeance. Hold on to your hat -- literally -- when you reach the elevated 16th green, and be sure to look back along miles of empty, dune-hemmed coast.
"Good thing you didn't play it on a day when the winds were up near 70," one local told me after I finished with a three-putt on 18. I didn't ask whether the 70 was in miles or kilometers per hour.
