Harbour Town.

Date Played: 12/13/25

Location: Hilton Head, SC

Yardage: X yards, 72.0/145

Architects: Pete Dye

Greens Fees: $525 (includes cart + forecaddie, excluding tip)

Another trip in the books, this time to Savannah/Hilton Head to escape the cold weather for a weekend. As I left Boston, it was 15 degrees with a feels like temperature right around zero. Needless to say, 65 degrees and sunny was a very welcomed sight upon getting to the course on Saturday.

I'll be honest, Harbour Town wasn't one I was exactly dying to play right away, but this time of year your options are somewhat limited. It was a cheap/direct flight down there, so I pulled the trigger. I stayed in Savannah and made the 1 hour commute up to Hilton Head on both Friday and Saturday to play Atlantic Dunes (Davis Love III) and Harbour Town (Pete Dye). Harbour Town was just reopened to the public after a renovation about a month ago, so I got to play it at about the most pristine you'll ever get it. Atlantic Dunes was a nice/fun course, but not worthy of a full length review.

Before I dig into the golf, let me just say Savannah may be one of the cooler cities I have seen. The architecture, the vibe, the unique mix of people, the food, all of it is pretty amazing. I'd love to get back there and have a bit more time to explore. Here are a few bonus pictures of Savannah before I get into the course.

Anyways, onto the golf.

Harbour Town is a very interesting course because the whole Sea Pines resort basically grew around the course. When you get onto the Sea Pines, you end up driving through a bunch of townhouse parking lots and small little one lane roads to get there. It's a very different experience than most elite courses where you drive through a big gate with an oversized sign. If you didn't have a GPS, it'd be incredibly difficult to even find Harbour Town on the Sea Pines.

The course is known as one of the great Pete Dye courses, in his pantheon with TPC Sawgrass and The Ocean Course at Kiawah, among others. It's been hosting the RBC Heritage for decades now, and is widely regarded as one of the PGA players favorite tournaments each year. I think the thing I immediately noticed about Harbour Town and Sea Pines in general is how proud the residents are of it. They really love that place and love supporting the RBC every year. It was cool to see.

The clubhouse is a big, sprawling building with several places to eat and a Pete Dye museum inside of it. A very different vibe than Erin Hills, but it was cool to see how much they cared about the architect and his legacy.

One thing I really appreciated about Harbour Town is how walkable the course is. With your greens fees they include a cart and a forecaddie (basically a caddie who doesn't carry clubs), which was nice, but they also give you the option to take a pushcart instead. I am always a proponent of walking over riding, so I opted for the push cart, especially since it's cart path only for motorized carts.

I was paired up with an older gentleman from Indiana named Bryan, and our caddie was Brett, who was a recently retired aviation engineer for the military. Both were really great guys and we had an awesome time together on the course. Bryan could really play, I would guess he shot somewhere in the mid/high 70's, which is a no small feat on this course, especially from the white tees for a guy around 70 years old. He could really move it though, still hitting the ball about 260 off the tee.

Here's a summary of a few of my favorite holes from the day:

Hole 1: Par 4, 380 yards, 6 handicap

What a way to start your round. This was probably the most narrow first fairway I have ever played at only 30 yards wide. You really have to be in the fairway to have any shot at all of being on in two here, as the trees start to cut in and block out the green as you get further down. I wouldn't say it was a particularly memorable hole because of any specific architecture features, just a really demanding hole that sets the tone for how the rest of the course will play.

Of course, I blasted it into the trees on the left and made double. That's golf.

Hole 4: Par 3, 156 yards, 12 handicap

What you see is what you get with this one (and a lot of the par 3's, for that matter). They all kind of follow a similar template of 155ish yards and risk/reward to take on the pin, but plenty of bail out area to play it safe. It's just classic strategic and penal architecture. Sometimes it doesn't have to be any more complex than that. Either you hit the shot or you don't. But you always have options.

I played it safe off of the right fringe here and got up and down for par.

Hole 7: Par 3, 160 yards, 16 handicap

Same story as the 4th hole here. This hole is littered with trouble. You have water that should be out of play, but any amateur knows that a nice fat chunk is always a possibility. The green is surrounded on three sides with sand, and a big mound in front protects the front pin. This one is all carry, and once again, either you can hit the shot or you can't. It's a test in execution. Not my favorite hole architecturally, but I found it stunning to look at.

I came 2 yards short of carrying that front mound and was lodged into the bank of it. From there I just had to get one on and two putt. Out of there with a bogey.

Hole 9: Par 4, 292 yards, 10 handicap

When I think about my favorite strategic hole on the course, it's definitely this one. Harbour Town isn't really a super strategic course in general, more a penal course. What you see is what you get with most holes here. Narrow fairways put a premium on your tee shot. The greens are a good size, but are almost always protected with severe bunkering, placing a premium on your approach as well. It's an execution test, not a thinking test.

However, the 9th hole is really the best of both worlds. At only 300ish yards, it's a classic short par 4. You can either push the ball down as far as possible, but often times it will actually leave you with a harder shot in (as I had). Or you can play it safe off the tee, lay back to about 100 yards, and give yourself a comfortable full wedge in. As you can see, I opted for the former. Upon getting to my ball though, I really wished I had played it the other way, as I had a testy little pitch shot off of a tight lie over a bunker onto a narrow heart shaped green. I thought it was just great design.

I ended up hitting a really good little 30 yard shot and lipped out my birdie putt to make par. I'll be really curious to see how the pros play this one at the RBC.

Hole 13: Par 4, 332 yards, 11 handicap

I actually didn't like this hole very much, but I had to put it in here because it was unlike any other hole I'd ever played. If I thought the holes leading up to this asked you to execute, this one took it to another level. It was actually designed by Pete Dye's wife, Alice, which I thought was a really fun wrinkle.

Off of the tee, it absolutely demands that you hit roughly a 200-220 yard shot into a very specific window of the right/middle of the fairway. Anywhere else, you're going to be blocked out by overhanging trees. It's truly as specific a landing area as I have experienced. Bryan and I were 10 yards apart from each other, and he was completely blocked out while I had a good look.

From there, the fun is only beginning. The green is surrounded by this massive heart shaped bunker. This is where the courses signature 'bulkhead bunkering' really starts to become apparent. It's only about a 100 yard shot, but if you leave it short, you are completely hosed. There's plenty of room to miss long, but it doesn't appear that way from the fairway.

Well, I came up short. I was pressed right up against the bulkhead with a fried egg lie, my only option was to blast one into the bulkhead, and hope it bounced backwards far enough to give myself room to hit my next shot up and on. Spoiler alert: it didn't. It basically dropped straight down, and I had to play my next bunker shot sideways and then hit ANOTHER bunker shot. I ended up making a triple bogey from 100 yards out in the middle of the fairway. I don't know if that's good design or me just not being very good at golf, but it was frustrating to be that heavily penalized by missing 3 yards short.

The next 5 holes are about as good a stretch of golf holes as you'll play though, so Harbour Town redeemed itself.