Amelia Island, Florida

I know an almost perfect golf spot on Amelia Island. You can pause there between oak hammocks and tumultuous shoreline, hearing a dense woodland hush in one ear and the sea’s quiet roar in the other. Our game is full of blessed spots like this—points on the landscape that rumble a golfer’s soul. I linger in this pleasing nook between No. 3 green and No. 4 tee at Amelia Island Plantation’s Ocean Links course, aware that over the dune crest a pounding surf and Atlantic winds dutifully carve and shave the beachfront.

This barrier island, measuring 13 miles north to south, lies just below the Georgia border some 20 miles up from Jacksonville. Amelia’s history is marked by alternating periods of prosperity and privation. Its economy is split between traditional industries on the island’s west side and recreational beaches along the east, likewise between the quaint commerce of Fernandina Beach to the north and the grand resort presence at the south end.

In 1974 Amelia Island Plantation helped transform this place from a sleepy regional getaway into a premier golf-and-recreation destination. Today the resort is a 1,300-acre compound with more than 660 guest rooms (including 249 in the oceanfront Inn & Beach Club), eight restaurants, a spa, shopping, a market, labyrinthine walking paths and three 18-hole golf courses.

Pete Dye crafted the original 27 holes, discovering three routings that drift from inland forest seclusion to open scenes of shoreline and marsh. The two nines that climax with expansive Intracoastal Waterway views are today played as the Oak Marsh course. The third nine was extended to 18 holes and renamed Ocean Links in 1998.

The land used for that latter project had to be gathered up piecemeal, using several pods of real estate scattered throughout the property. Fortunately those parcels included some stunning seafront acreage that allowed the architect, Bobby Weed, to build two of the most provocative ocean holes in the South—the majestic par-3 15th and par-4 16th—giving Ocean Links an unbeatable five holes directly on the Atlantic (the middle holes on the front nine round out that quintet). Greens and tees for these holes aren’t merely next to the coastal dunes—they are the dunes. Weed also renovated the remaining Dye holes (including Oak Marsh), infusing these relatively short courses with putting surfaces of three-dimensional nuance.

Tom Fazio’s Long Point Golf Club opened in 1987 with its own set of watery adventures, including the graceful par-4 second along the edge of the marsh and the bounding par-4 12th, which creases another broad inlet. Back-to-back oceanside par-3s at 15 and 16 are spectacular, even set as they are slightly below dune level. A renovation project in 2003 vaulted Long Point into the elite of pristinely conditioned courses.