Everyone tells you to pray for sunshine. Don't.
We booked an early tee time because the guidebooks all say the trades pick up after eleven. They pick up at seven. By the time we reached the first tee the palms behind the clubhouse were doing that thing where they bend the wrong way and everybody pretends not to notice.
Here's what nobody tells you: grey is Poipu Bay's best light. The greens go luminous. The ocean turns that hard pewter color instead of postcard blue. You can actually see the shape of the land, which is the whole point of a Robert Trent Jones Jr. course — he built the holes to sit in the ground rather than on top of it, and in flat sunshine you miss half of it.
She teed off first, into the wind, with a fairway wood, and put it in the middle. He said something encouraging. She said nothing at all, which after thirty-six years is a full sentence.
The cliffs are the whole reason
You play nine holes of good, solid resort golf and then the course walks you out to the edge of the island and dares you. Black lava, white surf forty feet below, a fence, a warning sign, and a hiking trail full of people who will absolutely watch you swing.
This is where the round stops being a round. We hit our tee shots, then just stood there for a while. Nobody behind us. Nobody rushing. That's the part you pay for.
Two strangers, one green, and a putt she didn't need help with
We got paired up on the back with two guys from Oahu who played fast, said almost nothing, and turned out to be the best company we've had on a course in years. On eighteen all four of us were on the green at once and nobody said a word while she read her line.
He has spent thirty-six years learning not to say anything at that moment. It took roughly thirty-four of them. Rule three, if you're keeping track.
She made it. The Oahu guys tapped their putters on the ground, which is apparently the local version of a standing ovation, and we drove up the eighteenth fairway toward that green roof with the wind finally at our backs.
The resort does the one thing that matters
The Grand Hyatt next door frames the ocean through an open-air lobby with a banyan tree the size of a house, and every afternoon somebody stands in that doorway taking the exact same photograph. We took it too. No regrets.
Practical: the walk from room to first tee is short enough that you can go back for the jacket you didn't think you'd need. You will need it.
If you're playing it as a couple
Cheaper, emptier, and the cliff holes land right at the good light. You may not finish. You won't care.
Play from wherever you each actually enjoy it. Nobody is watching your scorecard except the person in your cart, and they've seen worse.
It's Hawaii, so you'll leave it in the room. Then you'll reach the ocean holes and one of you will be very quietly right about this.
Get out of the cart. Take the picture of each other, not the view. The view is on a thousand websites. You two aren't.
It loses one for the price, which is genuinely eye-watering, and for a front nine that's merely very good. It earns the other four for three holes on the edge of the Pacific, a staff that never once made us feel rushed, and a grey Tuesday that we will be talking about for a long time.
