FLC Quy Nhon (Ocean)

Situated less than an hour’s drive from Phu Cat Airport, FLC Quy Nhon Beach & Golf Resort offers visiting golfers a fabulous 36-hole experience, with two courses fashioned amidst a thrilling landscape of pine forest and dunes by the reputable companies of Nicklaus Design and Schmidt & Curley.

Overlooking Nhon Ly Beach and the South China Sea, both layouts were built in record time by Flagstick, one of the region’s foremost golf construction companies, who have extensive experience working in China, Japan, the Philippines and Thailand. The Nicklaus Design Ocean course was first to open for play in 2016. The Schmidt & Curley-designed Mountain course opened in February 2017.

The returning front nine on the Ocean course plays through woodland then the back nine holes are routed around more open terrain, separated by pine trees from an element of residential properties on three of the holes. Platinum paspalum grass is used on every hole, presenting golfers with a consistent playing surface throughout the layout.

Jim Wagner from Nicklaus Design kindly supplied us with the following exclusive comments:

FLC Quy Nhon is a special resort project. There are luxury villas overlooking golf on the back nine with views to the sea. There is also a large resort hotel on the property which I believe has 400 rooms. Schmidt and Curley have designed a second course above ours on a more challenging site in terms of elevation change.

The Ocean course is built on a tremendous site. To put it in perspective, it’s quite possible I will never work on a site this good moving forward. The front nine is carved through a pine forest at a higher elevation than the back nine and five holes on the front side have ocean views so it’s spectacular stuff.

Our concept was to have wall to wall fairway with no rough, but we did expand the width of the fairways to allow for fair and friendly play. Off the fairway, you go into a sand and pine straw look, which is very nice and very natural. We also brought pine straw and native material into the back of bunkers to enhance the visual interest of the course.

The site is all sand and it percolates extremely well. In fact, the only wash outs we had during grow-in were areas coming off the cart path. We have no storm drainage apart from maybe fifty sumps throughout the golf course. We also didn’t need to develop USGA greens so, like our other new course at Samson, we have straightforward push-up greens.

There are no lakes on the golf course. The irrigation lake was developed adjacent to the 5th green in a huge natural low. We merely had to cut and build up one side to create it. The site was so natural, it would have been foolish to try and contrive a lake in there somewhere else for strategy.

The routing was so much fun on this one as I basically found each hole walking the property over and over and over and over! That process allowed us to preserve the site’s natural character 100%. We cleared enough room to create golf, particularly on the front nine which was a dense pine forest.

The back nine is open to the ocean with the left side of 10-12 having a pine buffer between golf and the luxury villas. We have superb ocean views on every hole on the back nine. We did import thousands of shrubs, which were found across the road from the property and we planted more pines to fill some voids.

We didn’t move much material at all during construction. I think we had four or five areas with 2-3 meter cuts over 100 meters or so to help us achieve necessary visibility into features and green sites. I would wager we moved only 50,000 cubic meters, if that.

Once we cleared the trees, we discovered amazing natural movement. All we did was massage it so it could be mowed. We preserved everything we could out there. All bunkers were cut into natural features and it just so happened they worked wonderfully with the strategy, which was all developed in the field.

The green sites were basically just lying there and we manipulated them to create pin areas and feed in slopes in what was a truly unique experience. I believe Quy Nhon could easily be seen as one of Asia’s best courses.