Lana‘i Golf Excursion
A chip shot away from Maui's golf venues, this "private island" offers an Experience and Challenge of its own.
Matthew Thayer
Golf on Lana‘i is an edge-of-the-world experience that challenges players with three uniquely different course designs and environments. Granted, as you line up a shot on any of the layouts you never know when deer, or a flock of turkeys, will burst from the trees to run across the fairway right in front of you . . . but that is about where the similarities end.
The Experience at Ko‘eleis far from the average Hawai‘i resort course. If you scooped up a foursome of golfers from anywhere in the world and dropped them on the 17th tee, they might think they were in Vermont, or even Germany. Cool mountain air, towering pines and a par-four green beckon from the valley below. The course that Greg Norman and Ted
Robinson designed slices through mountaintop forests 2,000 feet above sea level—its allure is shot making and soft greens.
The Jack Nicklaus-designed Challenge at Manele course is the sort of layout that people dream of when they book tickets for a golf vacation in Hawai‘i. The course dances along tall seaside cliffs, and every hole has an ocean view. Trade winds stir the warm air as sailboats ply the cobalt waters below.
Rounding out the mix on Lana‘i is the free public Cavendish Course in Lana‘i City. There are no carts or tee times at this nine-hole layout. Walk a few holes here and you feel like you have stepped back in time.
I would side with many other Hawai‘i resident golfers in saying the Experience at Ko‘ele is my favorite course on Lana‘i. With temperatures in the seventies and sometimes sixties, fog mixed in liberally with sunshine, and fairways lined by stands of eucalyptus, pine and thick brush, this is one of the only courses in the state to have Bent-style grass greens. That means you can aim right for the hole and not worry about your ball bouncing off a rock-hard green into a back trap.
Assistant golf professional Kevin Bresnahan says the Experience is unique. “The guests are just amazed at the design,” shares Bresnahan. “It’s not what they expect. . . . A lot of the local Hawaiian people love to come up, because it provides an escape with its cooler temperature.”
The Experience at Ko‘elewas opened in April of 1991. Using a traditional parkland design, it is a 7,014-yard-long par 72. This eighteen-hole course is a combination of two very distinct halves. The front nine winds through former pineapple plantation farmland and is relatively flat. Luxury homes now line some of the fairways, and brush and trees have also filled in to wipe away any memory of abandoned rows of fruit. This nine offers several beautifully landscaped water features and has an island green on the par-4 8th hole.
