Ahoy Mate!

Cape Cod’s Captains Golf Course suits its seafaring surroundings to a tee

By Jeff Blanchard

The Captains Golf Course is a municipal 36-hole club located in Brewster, the crook of Cape Cod’s arm where many of the more prosperous 19th century merchant ship captains built stately homes that can still be found along its charming, tree-lined Main Street.

But to fully understand what sets the Captains apart from the municipal herd, it is helpful to consider the course in the context of its 20-year history.

Back in 1984, Brewster, because of its geography and relative affordability, was becoming one of the fastest growing municipalities in Massachusetts. With Brewster’s population swelling toward 10,000, and three times that number making it their summertime home, residents were studying golf as a way to bring in money and to enhance the town’s recreational appeal. Unlike, say, Hyannis and Orleans, Brewster’s waterfront is sleepy. There are no busy harbors, no ports or docks, and no ocean beaches with 1,000-car parking lots to fuel the seasonal economic engine.

As Steve Knowles, a Brewster native, and the co-head professional at Captains, along with Chris Dupill, recalled of the golf movement of the 1980s, “We wanted to give the people who lived in town both an affordable place to play golf and a reasonable source of revenue, enough to make it attractive to operate, but not so expensive or exclusive that the residents would get up in arms, as they would if we made it more of a private club.”

One point of contention in the course debate was the cost: $2.2 million for land acquisition, design and construction of what the critics saw as a country club.

“We wanted to make it as high end a public course as we possibly could,” Knowles continues. “The thinking was if we were going to do it, we wanted to do it in a way that would give townspeople something to be proud of. That’s why the town hired Cornish and Silva to design the course.”

Ultimately, voters backed the bond measure, and in doing so made theirs the only municipality between here and the land’s end to have a championship course to call its own. Eventually, residents of Orleans and other towns would make enough of a ruckus that Captains decided to throw open its doors to out-of-towners, at $2,000 a year, versus $550 for residents, a move that attracted 200 new members and raised $400,000.

The local angle

“I see it as a bargain, and not just in terms of the money,” says Joe Lewis, a Orleans resident and the owner of the Barley Neck Inn. “Just being able to drive a few minutes to a place with 36 holes and usually not much of a wait, it’s a great thing to have.”

Unlike courses throughout much of America, Captains and most of the other municipals on Cape Cod do not charge annual members a greens fees (which are $65 at peak). An added bonus to a Cape membership is that it earns reciprocal rights to all the other municipals, reducing greens fees to a flat $25 for Monday-Thursday play.

Captains was carved out of a pine forest framed by Route 6, otherwise known as the Mid-Cape Highway, Route 39, which runs between Orleans and Harwich, and the southern edge of Nickerson State Park, a popular place for summertime camping and year-round trekking and fishing.

The course is on one side of Freemans Way and its driving range is on the other, a function of the lack of space on the south side, according to Director of Operations Mark O’Brien. The range may look like an after-thought, but that is about to change with a complete overhaul scheduled for a June 2005 completion.

On the one hand the Captains is in the middle of nowhere, several miles from any beach. On the other hand it is very accessible to the motoring public and unfettered by the travel hazards that are synonymous with Cape Cod. From any direction the drive is simple and easy, a couple of miles from Exit 11 off the highway, a straight shot down Freeman’s Way.

Just beyond a putting green, which acts as a buffer between the cars and the course, is the clubhouse, with a fully-stocked grillroom and function hall on the right, and a cart shack and pro shop on the left. Through the middle of all that is the starter’s shed – the epicenter of two 18-hole courses that flow with the interlocking shape of a giant pretzel.

Three ways around

Rather than simply open up a new course next to the old, the design team decided to make two new courses with an almost equal combination of new and old holes. This way, golfers have a choice between the Port and the Starboard during the busy months, and everyone goes back to playing the original 18 over the winter, out of consideration for the new grass.

Some like the Port better and some prefer Starboard, but you don’t often hear people voice a preference for the old 18; most tend to favor the new holes in general, and not only for their newness, but for their aesthetics. As for salient differences between the Port and Starboard, there aren’t many. Starboard is 52 yards longer at 6,776 from the tips and includes four par 5’s and four par 3’s. Port is 6,724 yards from the tips and comes with five par 5’s and five par 3’s.

One regular with a preference for the Port is Jason Weaver, a local carpenter who says he likes the feeling he gets while standing on the elevated tee at No. 3 and being able to scan the panorama below, a view that features parts of about six holes. This scenic par-3 is 160 yards downhill to a large kidney-shaped, front-sloping, rough-collared green with a gaping bunker in the left side nook. “Heaven,” Weaver calls it.

A design in the pines

Credit for the layout goes to Brian Silva, who designed the original 18, which was named Golf Digest’s best new public course in 1985. At the time Silva was a young architect in partnership with the esteemed Geoffrey Cornish. He later designed the second 18 as a seasoned partner with Cornish, Silva, and Mungeam, Inc. Some of the firm’s other designs include Red Tail, Stow Acres, Firestone West, Shaker Hills and Waverly Oaks.

The son of a golf contractor, Silva likes to create courses that will be played by all skill levels, using the natural environment as a template for his visually appealing art. What he created in the Captains is a pleasurable place to spend three to five hours knocking golf balls around among the turf, trees and traps of this rolling terrain.

There are a few places with back-and-forth fairways, but Captains is mainly a series of forest clearings that dip this way and that toward a green that is usually big, subtly sloping and true, if sometimes slow and not always steady.

Stephen Mann is the longtime superintendent at Captains, and he keeps the place in very good shape, especially considering the number of rounds (85,000 annually). If you see a handsome yellow Lab bouncing around, that’s Steve’s right-hand dog, J.J., who fits in nicely with the nautical motif, as Captains pays homage to its seafaring past by naming the holes after its famous shippers and by marking the tees and yardages with cleats and pilings.

She came, saw and conquered

One member who was drawn to the town in large measure because of the course is Diane Conrad, a former golf coach and gym teacher from Bethpage, Long Island. She began, like so many others, by renting a summer place not far from the water. Today, she is the seven-time defending women’s club champion.

Conrad, whose resume includes a 9 handicap and a hole-in-one (at another Cape municipal, Sandwich Hollows), said for some reason she seems to play Starboard better than Port, and so she prefers the former for its ability to improve her mood. “I find the front nine on the Port to be a very difficult test of golf,” she says.

An especially challenging stretch found on the Port’s front side is the par-5, 508-yard sixth, the 427-yard, par-4 seventh and the 529-yard par-5 eighth, which is the old No. 14 and goes about 400 yards before it drops off like a cartoon canyon and then doglegs to the left, straight down to a pond that sits at the bottom of a hill with a green at the top.

It is one of only two water holes at Captains, with the other one also appearing on the Port, at No. 14, a tight, right-tilting, right-turning 353-yarder with a pond protecting the right side of the green. It is as pretty as they come here at Captains, and it’s followed by a short par 3 (153 yards from the whites) with a bunker on each side and a third right smack dab in the middle of the fairway in front of the green.

Conrad’s favorite hole is the old No. 2, now No. 14 on Starboard, where the tees range between 299 in front and 374 in back. The hole lays out before you with a beckoning innocence, a fairly flat, wide fairway with only two hazards, a stretch of sand on the right and a tree toward the left side about 100 yards from the green. When things are going right, Conrad said she can drive the ball long enough to take the tree out of play even from the left side, which is the better angle to the green if you’re up that far.

“On a teacher’s pension I could never have handled retirement in the Hamptons,” she says. “But at $550 a year, I can afford to play golf in Brewster, and I’m very happy I do because it’s a unique place.”

It sure suits her game.