Dateline January 30, 2015, Cape Kidnappers
We drove from Millhills Lodge over to our round at Cape Kidnappers. The TomTom said it would take us thirty minutes, and the TomTom got us to the entrance in thirty minutes exactly. The only catch was that the entrance is not the course.
At the gate we rang in and were told to drive carefully, that it would be another fifteen minutes from there to the clubhouse. Some driveway. The inside road is narrow and winding, with speed bumps placed to remind anyone who forgets to drive slowly. We passed the lodges where overnight visitors stay and proceeded another four kilometers to the clubhouse.
An almost-empty course.
Like our day at Kauri Cliffs the week before, we were one of eight players the course was expecting for the whole day. The staff was, almost to a person, young Americans on their post-college golf years, several from US college golf programs, including one from Penn State. Very pleasant. We asked if they planned to stay on long-term. They said no, they were looking forward to going home and taking jobs at golf courses back in the States.
The owner.
Cape Kidnappers is Julian Robertson's second New Zealand course, the other being Kauri Cliffs up at the Bay of Islands. Forbes told the Cape Kidnappers story well in a 2012 piece on Robertson:
In 2001, he purchased another sheep farm, this one 6,000 acres, on stunning Hawke's Bay on the southeast coast of North Island. "It was just such a magnificent property, I couldn't help it," he explains. The Farm at Cape Kidnappers took Robertson six years to fully build out and opened in 2007. It reprises some of the Kauri Cliffs themes but tones down the golf a notch. (The Tom Doak course is still world-class but out of sight, down a hill from the main buildings. Guests can commute to their rounds via helicopter.)
So this is a Tom Doak design, where Kauri Cliffs was David Harman. Two different architects on two of the most spectacular sites in the country.
The first two holes, and then the third.
We drove off on the first hole, an interesting opener. The second was also fun. We arrived at the third tee. Peter, Janice, and John all missed the green. Then Bunny stepped up.
She struck the ball cleanly. It bounced once just short of the green, took the slope, and rolled toward the pin. We watched it roll, and roll, and roll. It clipped the pin and disappeared. We jumped. Her first hole-in-one. (The full story of that shot, including the duck-poop backstory and the day-of-threes, is in the Ace Bunny post.)
The fingers.
From there the course plays in and out of the long narrow fingers of land that reach out toward the ocean and drop straight off the cliffs at the end. It is genuinely awesome to play.
The maintenance crew was out putting up electric fencing to keep the cows off the playing surface. The cows were our gallery for the day.
At the turn.
The lodge brought down sandwiches for us at the turn, which is exactly the kind of touch the Robertson properties are known for. We carried on to the back nine.
Many of the back-nine holes play along the cliff edges, with signs marking the edge in case the height itself did not get the message across. Janice played one ball right out to the edge, somehow got it next to the pin, and (thankfully) stayed on terra firma herself.
The beauty of the course is hard to capture in a regular camera shot. Many of the pictures you see in the brochures are aerial, which is how you really need to look at the routing for the greens and cliffs to make sense. We can only say: trust us, they really are like that.
We finished the round and spent some time in the pro shop, picking up a shirt, a hat, and some Cape Kidnappers golf balls.
Back to Millhills Lodge for the gourmet dinner Penny and Sam had been preparing.
