Round 14 - July 12, Mont Saint Marie; sunny with cloudy periods, windy, 19 degrees
Golf is about a lot of things. Playing, swinging, scoring, thinking, hoping, wishing, focusing, but one thing that is often overlooked or simply abandoned is walking and admiring the beauty around you. As Agatha McNaughton, a dear friend of Shivas Irons said, "Golf is for smellin' heather and cut grass and walkin' fast across the countryside and feelin' the wind and watchin' the sun go down and seein' yer friends hit good shots and hittin' some yerself.." That's what today was all about. At one point as I walked over the 8th tee box after striking a beautiful 250 yard play, I walked through some long fescue. As the sun beat down and warmed my bones the smell of the grasses took me back to a summer some 30 years ago. How I could remember being a boy of 10 or 12 with nothing better to do than catch grasshoppers in the tall grass and lie on my back in the fields and see what I could see in the clouds, and dream of never ending summers.

I arrived at Mont Ste. Marie as a guest of my good friend Mike Dalzell the Marketing Director for the mountain. It was 9:45 and I was scheduled for a 10 AM tee off. My partner Kevin Brady had to bow out once again so I did a walk up. I was matched up with Gilles and Andre a couple of casual golfers from Masson. It was Gille's third time out and Andre's first.

As I was soon to find out, Mont Ste. Marie is a very difficult course. Rated 71.6 off the blues and 69.9 off the whites, with slopes of 128 and 126 I was soon reminded how difficult a course with that rating is! All the fairway bunkers are really well placed to gobble up arrant drives between 200 and 240 yards off the whites. Most of the fairway bunkers run parallel to the fairways and can be as long as 50 yards. All the greens are either very well protected by two or three bunkers or water and most are quite undulating some having very steep slopes. It took seven or eight putts to really understand them and even then when you finally thought you had the break figured out you'd miss by inches.

I have to admit proudly that I cheated on this round. On eight, I played my tee shot into a fairway bunker at 240 yards. It just rolled in about a foot past the lip. The lie was horrendous. I addressed the ball and missed. Stroke? Yes, but I didn't count it. I just came off a quadruple bogie on 7, (a 174 yard par 3) so I figured I needed a break. On 16 I mis-read the distance past the front edge of the fairway bunker on my second shot. I was just trying to lay up on the 483 yard par 5 and plopped the thing into the never ending strip of fairway sand, which I thought was 120 yards away when in fact it was 140 yards! Anyway, I don't mind admitting to cheating here. This is a course where it might be acceptable. Especially if you had as many disasters as I did. I took 4 doubles, two triples, one quad, and yes one quint! I also had 3 pars and my second birdie of the season.

I finished with 100! Arrrrrrrrrggggg! My adjusted score was 97. Not as bad as it sounds. I hit 7 fairways, 5 greens, and took 35 putts. I actually had a good time. Mostly because of the beauty of the surroundings. On the 15, a 384 yard par 4, you play off an elevated tee down into a valley that is bordered to the south east by the mountain. As I walked down to my second shot I looked up and saw perched, hundreds of feet above us, three hang gliders preparing for take off. I yelled up to them and my greeting echoed off the mountain walls. It wasn't until we stepped up to the 17th green that they took off. What a sight! A nice way to finish a less than sensational round. Next week, The Loch March.