Pelican Hill Golf Club (Ocean North)

The Resort at Pelican Hill’s Ocean North course is one of two fabulous Tom Fazio designs that opened for play within a couple of years of each other at the start of the 1990s. Ocean North and Ocean South occupy a fantastic coastal setting on the clifftops between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach, less than an hour’s drive south of downtown Los Angeles.

In 2005, both 18-hole layouts closed for an extensive upgrade – described as “a two-year re-perfection” by Tom Fazio – which included re-turfing fairways and tees with a hybrid Bermuda grass, converting rough to fescue and rye grasses, modifying/adding bunkers to enhance strategy or aesthetics and re-contouring fairways to assist with drainage.

In addition, tee boxes were rebuilt and a number of new tees were added (extending both courses by around two hundred yards), a number of greensites were expanded to increase playing options around the putting surfaces, high-traffic areas were sand-capped, cart paths were resurfaced and a state of the art water system was installed to conserve and recycle water.

Feature holes on the Ocean North course include the 197-yard 2nd and the 170-yard 6th, with both of these downhill par threes playing to greens perched on the other side of a small canyon. On the back nine, the 558-yard 17th is regarded as the signature hole on the course, swinging right and down to a promontory green – approach shots played beyond the putting surface are in big trouble here.