It was a mistake.  We should not have gone to play golf today.  It was blowing an absolutely hoolie in Las Vegas itself, let alone what it turned out to be like out on the desert plain on which the three courses at Pauite are located.

I’m not going to make any excuses for my 19 over score (remember I play off 8), the course was just too tough for me, particularly as I thought I should play off the Black tees (7,009 yards on the card but playing more like 6,900 on the day based on where the tee markers were on the tee boxes).

The course was superb and on any normal day will still be a tough challenge, but as it turns out there are very few windless days in the valley where the course is based so if this is a course you are going to play, you might want to check the local conditions at the course before going.

The fairways have a quite narrow strip of rough alongside them, then it’s all desert, so hitting the fairways is the order of the day.  I missed quite a few and when the ball is hitting stones and rocks over 200 yards away, seeing where it bounces and ended up is quite a challenge.  For example, on the par4 7th hole (470 yards) I missed the fairway but caught the rough with my drive.  However I pushed my 3 wood second shot right and saw it heading for the rocks and lost sight of it.

When we arrived at where I thought it might have landed it was nowhere to be seen.  So it was off to my second ball and a chip and two putts later I walked off with a triple bogey seven.  As we walked off the green and drove to the next tee, there was my ball, sitting on the tee box some sixty yards from where we had been looking.

As the photograph on the right shows, one other really interesting hole was the island green on the par 3 15th.  It only plays 162 yards but in today’s wind it seems a million miles away, that and the fact that the pin was on the right and the wind was coming hard from the right, getting anywhere close to the pin seemed (& was) almost impossible).  A bogey four seemed like a reasonable score to me, although was we walked onto the green I realised just how big it was and that I could have hit much more club than I actually did.

Anyway, great club, go play it, it’s worth the 40 min drive out from Las Vegas.