The 16th green at Point Hardy Golf Club.Jacob Sjoman - jacob@sjomanart.com/Point Hardy Golf Club
The North Atlantic Ocean slams into the Caribbean Sea at St. Lucia, a symbolic meeting place for a turbulent history with many chapters and characters: Arawaks, Caribs, French, English, Africans, colonial plantation owners and pirates, all brought to the island by settlement or plunder. But today’s arrivals carry passports and fresh passions.
There are honeymooners, yacht owners and others who value St. Lucia’s warm climate, gentle pace and volcanic scenery, from the spire-like hills called the Pitons and plunging clefts to dense jungle and sugary beaches. And, increasingly, there are golfers, enticed by a new course at Cap Estate on the island’s northern tip. For three years, the soaring tropical garden of Cap Estate has made Point Hardy Golf Club one of the game’s most talked-about developments. Completed at last, it has quickly scorched its way on to the golf world’s most-followed Instagram feeds and top-100 lists, an improbable bauble for the island’s tourism-heavy economy. The course is destined to be private, but the window is open for visits by prospective members and homeowners and invited guests.
Point Hardy’s opening in early December served as an official milestone for its members and an unofficial sigh of relief for its Canadian developers, because getting to the finish line never seemed guaranteed. Cap Estate had been the site of not just dreamscapes but tragedy and broken dreams: a former slave plantation, military base and distressed asset whose main advantage, dizzying oceanside topography, seemed like the stuff of screensavers, not levelled fairways. Many golf courses have been imagined in such places but ended up like Japan’s famous Ukiyo-e woodcut prints – fantastic yet fantastical, too dream-like to be real.
“It was spectacular beyond description. But all I could see was the potential for a bunch of unenjoyable golf holes,” says American course designer Bill Coore, 77, sipping a cool Piton beer while recalling his initial apprehensions about the 150-hectare site.
Taming the vertical visuals into golf holes was a project years in the making, and not just for Coore. In 2007, Singaporean hotelier Raffles and golf icon Jack Nicklaus were among those who signed on for a project at Cap Estate before the recession pulled the rug out from under them.
Point Hardy Golf Club's fairways are receptive, laden with subtle knolls and shoulders that steer tee shots and approaches back from the edge.Point Hardy Golf Club
Toronto entrepreneur Ben Cowan-Dewar, 44, who launched his development career at Cabot Links and Cabot Cliffs in Cape Breton through the teeth of that same recession, saw Cap Estate in 2015 and placed a bet that he and his growing Cabot team could make it work. But as Coore and co-designer Ben Crenshaw arrived, the full scope of the challenge emerged. Environmental concerns needed addressing. Archaeological sites needed investigating. Politicians and communities needed reassuring. Finished work needed rebuilding repeatedly after torrential rainstorms. And then came COVID-19. Point Hardy crawled nearly to a halt, but the delays bought time for the team to massage the slopes, one yard at a time, into the “playability” that would make or break their high ambitions.
The course and experience they’ve produced is vertigo-inducing and psychologically jarring, because golf has no hazard more inevitable than gravity. But the fairways are receptive, laden with subtle knolls and shoulders that steer tee shots and approaches back from the edge. The worst shots will still meet cruel fates, but staggering scenery, and coolers of Pitons, are there to wash away the tears.
From the first tee near Donkey Beach, Point Hardy scales a 70-metre ridge, then walks it like a plank. It turns back toward the ocean for the fifth and sixth, which fall through a runoff valley of savage vegetation and scale. A playable funnel has been created with a wide, carefully contoured fairway, ball-saving bunkers and a narrow ditch that channels water away from play.
The next three holes traverse the water’s edge and a clifftop cactus meadow, returning to the beach. Crenshaw, 71, is particularly smitten by the seventh hole, a crosswind pitch to a tiny, delicately oriented green ringed by the Atlantic and oblivion. “It’s just big enough at the margins,” he says. “But it’s the angle that fascinates me.”
The 10th hole goes directly uphill. It feels audacious, maybe ill-advised, like a mountain ascent you haven’t trained for. It’s already being chewed over critically, with one writer describing it as a “Q*bert pyramid.” The Cabot team has been carefully watching early play, and a gentler alternative is being roughed in lower down the ridge. But a course of this ambition has the latitude (and the altitude) to push some boundaries. Coore points to other maligned holes at other courses that have eventually won over critics. The decision is ownership’s to make, he makes clear, but he’d love to see the original remain in play long enough to become part of Point Hardy’s fabric.
The final holes are a crescendo of serrated cliffs, wind-rustled thickets, churning ocean carries and shouts of astonishment from grown men and women. There is a hole like a mountain pass and a hole like climbing window ledges. The clifftop 17th hole is a leap between two volcanic towers rising from the sea, its tee placed in a spot so precarious, so preposterous, so fantastical and yet so fantastic that it simply had to get built. The 18th is a short par 5 that nosedives 30 metres from the tee before crossing Donkey Beach and a last bit of sea foam, a screeching halt after four hours of wonder.
These are the scenes St. Lucia’s visitors are here to play among, the ones that have made the bruising effort to build Point Hardy worthwhile. Floating worlds that distill essence of place. Precise quantities of beauty renderable in sparse lines and harmonious perspective. Ukiyo-e landscapes come to life.
Beyond the course
North Comfort Station overlooking the 5th, 6th and 7th holes.Jacob Sjoman - jacob@sjomanart.com/Point Hardy Golf Club
Point Hardy is fast becoming an economic focal point for the top of St. Lucia, but the twin villages of Rodney Bay and Gros Islet have the benefit of not requiring tee times.
Rodney Bay is tourist central, a swirl of beach sand, restaurants and pastel retail outlets. Its marina offers fishing trips and boat tours to the iconic Pitons. Gros Islet, meanwhile, has genuine St. Lucian flavour. For 30 years, it’s been the host of an unmissable Friday-night “jump-up” street party, which has throbbed with fresh urgency since the pandemic. Looming over it all is Pigeon Island, a colonial-era fort with views to the capital of Castries, and the island of Martinique.
There are accommodations for a range of vacation budgets and itineraries, such as Sandals Grande, The Harbor Club and The Landings. There is also Cap Maison, which offers suites and villas and elevated St. Lucian food, including executive chef Craig Jones’s seemingly endless array of seafood, curries, wines and rums, served up in venues ranging from a walk-in wine cellar to a thatched beachside cabana called The Naked Fisherman.
Point Hardy will be a private club, but access is currently offered for prospective members and homeowners, and “invited guests, based on availability.” Air Canada, WestJet and Sunwing fly direct from Toronto to St. Lucia’s Hewanorra International Airport. Regional and private flights fly into George F.L. Charles Airport, closer to Cap Estate.
Special to The Globe and Mail
The author was a guest of Cabot Saint Lucia, which did not review or approve the article before publication.