Soggy Dunes

The Dunes, Kamloops, BC – Every once in a while, you visit a place where you wish you could come back when the weather is better. That’s never more true than when you play golf on a great course in the rain.

Maybe the Dunes isn’t a capital-G-Great golf course, but it sure seemed like it could deliver a nice round on a warm, sunny day.  A links style course with un-links-like well-bunkered greens, the gently rolling fairways were wide enough to encourage healthy swings with the driver, but narrow enough to keep you honest.  The colorful wild fescue along the fairways gave it a Scottish links feel (okay, how would I know?), and the paucity of water holes kept lost balls to a minimum.  In short, we liked it.

What we didn’t like was the slow play, especially when it began to rain on the 14^th hole. The course boasts that it “promotes a four-hour round,” but there was nary a marshall on the course to encourage the pokey foursome in front of us to move along. By the time we ended, there were four or five empty holes in front of them.

If we’d played at the “promoted” pace, we would have had one hole in the rain, not five.  But the old coots in front of us turned it into a five-hour round, largely because they won’t admit that they are too old and frail to play from the regular men’s tees anymore.  Not a one of them could drive more than 100 yards, and if one of them scored lower than 130, it had to be due to a very creative pencil. 

The rain.  Oh, the rain.  It wasn’t the “shower” the weather websites predicted.  It was what we in Seattle call “rain.”  Steady, soaking, dripping-from-every-seam rain, the kind of rain that makes you want to keep the hood up on your parka, until you realize you can’t see the ball when you turn your shoulders. Good thing I had a hood for my clubs or I’d been pretty upset about getting my new club grips wet. 

I guess the rain added to the Scottish atmosphere, and if we weren’t so tired of the old farts in front of us, we might have settled in for lunch at the clubhouse and stared at the soothing grayness. Instead, we packed up our wet clubs, shed our soaked shoes and headed up the hill for Sun Peaks, and tomorrow’s golf adventure. 

Of all the courses we’ve played so far around Kamloops, the Dunes – in spite of the weather and the slow play – has been my favorite.