GREAT ABACO ISLAND, The Bahamas -- I've found the real Bahamas. Not the over-developed, over-hyped Paradise Island version, but the Bahamas the British Loyalists found when they fled here in the 18th century. Descendants of those Loyalists -- and the Indians before them -- still live on the islands of the Abacos archipelago. That is, cobalt blue water, white sand beaches and fishing to last a lifetime, each in the serene surroundings where time, while not quite standing still, isn't in any hurry to move forward.
Now another Brit, Peter de Savary, has joined them here on Great Abaco, largest of the Abaco islands. De Savary's Abaco Club on Winding Bay is the ultimate Bahamian hideaway. With its two-plus miles of white sand beach, 75 Bahamian oceanfront cottages that overlook the bay (and a Bahamian sunset as orange as the rum Blasters at Pete's Pub) and Donald Steel-designed links golf course, this 500-acre property is set to take its place alongside de Savary's other properties, including Cherokee Plantation between Savannah, Ga., and Charleston, S.C., Bovey Castle in Devon, England, and Carnegie Abbey in Newport, R.I., as some of the best private club retreats in the world.
And with a membership fee of $65,000, the Abaco Club is considerably less than most high-end South Florida courses less than an hour's flight away from the club's private airport. Memberships come with the opportunity to rent the cottages.
De Savary is the multi-millionaire entrepreneur who founded The Carnegie Club at Skibo Castle and before that, the St. James Clubs in Los Angeles, London, Paris and Antigua. De Savary, who got his start in the shipping and oil business, sold those properties to finance The Carnegie Club at Skibo Castle, which he sold to a small group of members in 2003.
The $250 million investment de Savary (a self-admitted "non golfer") has made in the Abaco Club fits his lifestyle and passion as a world class yachtsman; the Abaco Club golf course, meanwhile, reflects the vision of Scottish architect Donald Steel, who along with partner Tom Mackenzie, has designed a textbook links course, meaning it has been built on a unsheltered sand on low-laying land by the sea -- in this case the Atlantic Ocean. Yes, most of the Bahama Islands, including Great Abaco, are in the Atlantic, not the Caribbean as many people believe.
H.N. Wethered, author of The Architectural Side of Golf, a must-read book for course design fanatics, described an authentic seaside course as one that "invariably possesses a beauty of quiet and subtle refinement of surface." The Abaco Club, Steel's seventh course for de Savary, fits nicely into Wethered's definition of a true seaside course as 14 holes play along the sand dunes and on the bluffs of Winding Bay in the minimalist style the architect seeks in all his work.
Steel designed the 7,183-yard, par 72 course, which opened only a few months ago, to play out and back, mirroring some of Scotland's more famous courses, including Royal Dornoch. Steel, by the way, is responsible for the final design of Royal Dornoch's Struie course.
The Abaco Club's first seven holes play out, with the back tee box of the 312-yard, par-4, fifth hole seated squarely on the beach. The green, obviously, is reachable for big hitters (the carry is 245 yards over a large dune) but the safer route is down the narrow right side of the fairway. A good driver requires only a wedge to the green and a good opportunity at a well-earned birdie.
On the subject of greens, the sand found on most of the holes at the Abaco Club conformed to U.S. Golf Association recommendations in their native state, meaning little sane had to be brought in from the outside, a rarity for courses in the Bahamas and Caribbean.
Steel steers the course back inward beginning with the eighth hole and crescendo's it with the final four holes. The 15th is a 419-yard, par 4 that sits above the first 14 holes for stunning views of Winding Bay and the water sports it offers; the 16th (385 yards, par 4) plays around a rock quarry that will eventually be filled with water; the 17th is a 204-yard, par 3 that overlooks a coral reef; and the 572-yard, par 5, 18th hole begins with a drive into a valley (with the Atlantic on the left) and finishes on a windy, elevated green that's guarded by three nasty bunkers on the right side.
You can make birdie or you can make double bogey. It doesn't really matter. The 18th is the perfect end to a near-perfect links course in a surprising, tropical locale in the real Bahamas.
