Post by Richie3Jack on Jun 27, 2013 13:21:41 GMT -5
Venetian Bay Golf Club is a semi-private course located in Port Orange, FL; just south of Daytona Beach. It is a Clifton, Ezell and Clifton design that plays to 7,072 yards with a 72.9 index and a 132 slope. It has a nice restaurant designed for fine dining for the middle to upper-middle class crowd and it has solid practice facilities.
Since moving to Florida, I have played quite a few Clifton, Ezell and Clifton designs from places like Stoneybrook East, Hunters Creek and Eastwood along with renovations like Rio Pinar, the El Campeon Course at Mission Inn Resort and some of their designs at The Villages like Cane Garden, Evans Prairie and Lopez Legacy.
I haven’t fallen in love with every one of their designs. I think Eastwood more or less grows on a golfer, but too many holes are goofy in structure and some make little sense (like the 6th hole). Stoneybrook East is next door to Eastwood and is a completely different animal, although I am not a fan of the design of the greens. Then we run into the same thing with most of their designs in The Villages, but their latest design, Evans Prairie, is flat out excellent.
To me this says that they are very flexible in their designs and they are set on designing a course according to what the land developer wants. You’re not going to get a Pete Dye or the late Mike Strantz type that is designing something more or less to put their imprint on what they think the course is going to look like. Instead, you’re getting a group of architects that have a ‘the customer is always right’ type of attitude.
The reason why I bring this up is that for all of the courses I’ve played in Florida and for all of the Clifton, Ezell and Clifton courses I’ve played, this is by far the flattest in shape. The course was in excellent condition, but I found it rather boring to play and fairly easy. There is water throughout the course, but they mostly decorate the course with bunkers. And the rough is more like slightly taller fairways.
With that, it was rather difficult to remember any of the holes. Even after I just got done playing them. This is not a complete knock on their design, but it is obvious that they were told to create a course that could build a membership and they wanted to engage females to get on the course. Thus, they created something that was flat, easy and in excellent condition with a nice restaurant.
The holes that were memorable were the par-5’s #5, #11 and #17. The rest mix and match and don’t really quite standout. With that said, I did not see one poorly designed hole outside of #9, which was more about me never playing the hole before rather than it being a poor design.
The positives about this course is the conditioning and I believe one can move around fairly quick here because it’s fairly straight forward and has a lot of members playing. It’s probably suited for the vacationer that is trying to shake some of the cobwebs and is looking for a track in good condition where they can lose a few drives and still put forth a good round. For the resident like myself, I think it’s best reserved for the winter time if the rates go up and you can find an affordable tee time.
3JACK