See You at Sea Pines

The iconic candy-striped lighthouse at Harbour Town Golf Links on Hilton Head Island is one of America’s great golf landmarks. It’s a truly exciting and inspirational sight as golfers walk down the 18th fairway to see this familiar structure in the distance behind the green.

Harbour Town Golf Links is the centerpiece amenity in the lush, sprawling 5,000-acre, self-contained Sea Pines Resort community, which spans more than one-third of Hilton Head Island. An impressive Sea Pines golf menu offers three superb courses.

Home to the PGA TOUR’s RBC Heritage, which is staged every April, the Pete Dye-designed (with consultation from Jack Nicklaus) Harbor Town Golf Links incorporates beautiful ponds, bulkhead framed greens, moss draped oaks, towering pines and views of Calibogue Sound. Recent enhancements include new TifEagle Bermuda grass for greens, new Celebration grass for fairways and a new irrigation system.

If watch PGA TOUR tournaments regularly on television, you, no doubt, tune in to watch the RBC Heritage. Much like Augusta National, you’re probably so familiar with many of the holes at Harbour Town that you feel as if you know the course even if you’ve never played it.

With its tight fairways and small greens, Harbour Town is very challenging but certainly enjoyable for everyone if you play from the correct set of tees for your skill level.

After playing Harbour Town, you should definitely tee up at the recently opened  7,010-yard Atlantic Dunes by Davis Love III course. It’s a complete reconstruction of the Ocean Course, which was the first layout ever built on Hilton Head Island. Love III, a five-time winner of the RBC Heritage at Harbour Town Golf Links, and his design team, rebuilt the holes to accommodate modern shot values and enhance the visual appeal of the course. Atlantic Dunes has a beachfront setting with accents like coquina shells and seaside grass and fairways lined with native pines and oaks. Love III also created new sand dunes to blend seamlessly with the natural dunes and also planted tens of thousands of indigenous plants. The carpet-like playing surface is a blend of cutting-edge grasses.

The third course in Sea Pine’s terrific trio is Heron Point By Pete Dye, an exceptional layout for all skill levels. There are seven sets of tees on each hole, a great mix of long and short risk-reward hotels and four holes with water guarding the greens.