Tee Time: 11:56am
Players: Jake, Dave, Jy
Winter golf in Korea! Some golf courses close for the winter but many are still open. Golf is obviously not as popular in Korea in the winter since it’s cold, the ground is frozen, snow on the ground, etc.
Overall golf in the winter is simply not a pleasant experience. Sometimes golf carts have heated seats and portable heaters in them to help you stay warm. But once you’re out, it’s hard to get your tee into the ground so there are these devices that will help you punch a hole in the ground. There are also some tees that are above ground that you can use as well.
The bunkers are generally frozen so if you hit into a bunker, you just pull your ball out and hit off the nearest fairway or rough.
The greens are frozen so hitting onto a green is sometimes like hitting into the cart path, etc.
In general, I don’t play golf in these types of conditions.
My general rule of thumb is that as long as it’s not raining or snowing, if the temperature is above 40, I’ll play. If it’s below 35 I won’t play. If it’s between 35 and 40 then I’ll consider it…
This past Saturday it was in the high 30s (around 39) so we played and it wasn’t too bad. The ground wasn’t totally frozen. Ocean course is also nice because it has western grass so it was still green and not yellow. The bunkers were soft and the greens were ok.
Sky 72 was also have a special sale for 2 weeks for the price of 120k krw green fees per person if you play a foursome so that was great. Ocean course during the summer is around 299k so it was more than 50% off! Of course you still pay the cart fee and caddie fee though.
Our caddie was a bit of a dud. Sometimes I forget that we’re in a foreign country and the level of English can be very low. For example, the name on my passport and official ID is LASTNAME FIRSTNAME MIDDLENAME so that’s how the reservation was set. but on my name tag is has my FIRSTNAME LASTNAME as well as in Korean my LASTNAME MIDDLENAME but since it wasn’t exactly what was written, the caddie couldn’t find my bag for a long time. Also, if you have a name like “DAVID KIM” and you sign in as “DAVE KIM” then she couldn’t find it, etc. I’ve never really had this issue before but this caddie came out with a poor attitude because I guess it took her a long time to find our bags. She did come out with all of our bags but complained that it took her a long time…just a lot of bitching and moaning IMO.
Anyway, the round was pretty fun and my driver was finally working again. I was mostly hitting baby fades which I’m ok with. I’d prefer to hit draws but there’s just too much room for error when hitting a draw so I’ll still with fades for now.
The best part of Sky 72 is that they have fish bread (boong uh bbang) and oh-deng in the winter!
