Travellers Rest Golf Group
What a remarkable week’s golf the TRGG has just experienced. It started off on Monday 2nd July in quite unremarkable fashion at Emerald, a favourite course for a number of members. The higher handicappers always seem to do well here and Monday was no exception with Willem Hagting playing off twenty seven winning with 42 points and Seamus Farrell (29) coming second on count back from Ted Senior (13) in third, with 35 points.
Tuesday 3rd July saw the first strange turn of events when the group took on Khao Kheow (B and C courses). The higher handicap golfers don’t tend to do so well here and spend a good deal of their time trying to fish their balls out of the water on this course as it is a true test of course management.
Ian Smith winner at Crystal Bay.
So two groups of four set off and quite unbelievably all four players in the first group shot 32 points and it at first appeared that after count back calculations the winner would be one of the four as this was the best score out of the whole group. However one player in the second group Ito Akitoshi, playing off a declared handicap of eight, shot 31 points. On returning to base and inputting all the scores on the computer it was discovered that Ito had in fact dropped to a nine handicap and because of a superior back nine holes to anybody in the first group jumped from fifth to first.
So just to clarify the results were as follows: Ito Akitoshi (9) 32 points in first place, Gerry Swan (14) 32 points in second and Neil Bramley (7) 32 points in third.
Thursday 5th July saw TRGG make its weekly pilgrimage to Phoenix where we took on the Mountain and Ocean courses. Ito Akitoshi obviously didn’t like playing off his new nine handicap and proceeded to blast the course apart and returned with 41 points so ensuring that he is now back to eight. Ito took first place from Mod Chaviraksa (13) on 37 points and Jim Cleaver (13) in third on 35.
Noel Pittard.
On Saturday 7th July we made our usual visit to Crystal Bay to play (A and B) courses. I don’t know whether the course that we played the previous Saturday had got easier or whether everybody had been taking their “make golf easy” pills but there were some truly remarkable scores returned.
Ian Smith, playing of twelve, won with 42 points from Jim Cleaver (13) and David Booth (14) who both shot 41 points. Special mention must also go to Bob Watson who now plays off minus one and returned with 39 points which included three ‘2’s in that score and Noel Pittard (6) 38 points. Noel also won the prize for the most colourful outfit on the course that day. In fact I think it was the most colourful in Thailand on the day. Even yours truly played like ten men on the day, unfortunately nine were dead and the other one was dying.
