Old Marsh Golf Club

Pete Dye was as proficient and prolific as any designer who ever lived at building golf courses in swamps, but the job at Old Marsh was particularly intense. Dye said the marshes and grasslands of the 440-acre site set inside a nature preserve between Jupiter and North Palm Beach reminded him of Africa, and it took years to get all the wetland setbacks authorized and the construction permitted. Old Marsh is indeed like a tour through a sanctuary, with the holes forming a continuous string of isolated land paths guiding players through a network of marshland, some natural and others developed by construction crews. The course is more low-profile than many Dye designs built in the 1980s in order not to interfere with the surrounding views and to encourage a bump-and-run style of play. The exception is the short par-4 fifth, Dye’s oft-repeated version of the Alps hole that demands players hit a blind approach over a two-story mound in front of the green.