If this is the end, then it’s a great way to nest
If you’re a fan of Doug Carrickdesigned golf courses, and a lot of people are, you may want to plan a trip up to the Barrie area next year.
It’s no secret that very few new golf courses are being built.
In fact, more golf courses are closing than new ones opening. That being said, a new Carrick designed course, The Nest at Friday Harbour, opened in Innisfil, near Barrie, last week.
“The first thing they said to me was ‘this has to be the best course you’ve ever designed’ so there was no pressure there,” Carrick said with a laugh last week during a round we played at The Nest.
The closing three holes at the Nest are carved through virgin forest.
The other 15 and the range are on what was flat farmland.
Don’t let that fool you, however. The Friday Harbour project involved building a marina on Lake Simcoe with a thousand boat slips. It’s huge and all the fill that was removed had to go some place.
“We got two million cubic metres of earth from the marina,” Carrick said. “They asked if I could get rid of it and I said ‘I think so.’
“It became a step-by-step project with the grading plans. I was nervous at first because of the volume of earth we were getting. And I was worried that it was going to look weird and I wanted it to look like a natural landscape, like a moraine that was formed by glaciers.”
In that regard, Carrick totally succeeded.
The golf course heaves and rolls and it’s only when you get to one of the higher tees you can look across the road and see a flat cornfield and realize what the golf course property looked like before Carrick waved his magic wand.
The only flat places on the whole golf course property now are the giant practice tee and the parking lot.
Carrick, who was inducted into the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame in 2015, has designed many spectacular courses that are on ScoreGolf Magazine’s Top 100 list, including Humber Valley in Newfoundland, the Ridge Course at Predator Ridge in Vernon, B.C., Muskoka Bay in Gravenhurst and Bigwin Island on Lake of Bays.
Those courses are located on spectacular tracts of land which dictated how they would be laid out.
At Friday Harbour, Carrick had pretty much a blank canvas. Well, a blank canvas and two million cubic metres of soil.
At 62, and with the golf design business slowing down dramatically, Carrick had also come to the stark realization that while he is still doing some remodelling and restoration work for golf clubs, this could be the last 18hole course he might ever design.
“I thought about that a lot actually,” admits Carrick.
If it is, he’s gone out with another winner.
For more on The Nest at Friday Harbour you can check out their website at fridayharbour.com/ golf-the-nest.
The Nest won’t be open to the general public until next spring.
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Whole-in-one:
Aces in the area include Blair Chatland on the 150-yard 17th hole at Wildwinds in Wellington, County with a seven wood and two at Willow Valley; Mark Glover on the 146-yard 13th hole with a nine iron, and Tony McGrath on the 142-yeard 15th hole with an eight iron.