Each April, the RBC Heritage Classic reminds us why Hilton Head became known as Golf Island. Quantity, quality, and the degree of pure enjoyment join together to earn us the title. Here in Spicebush at Sea Pines, we see it all around. It’s a privileged position – now or anytime you choose to visit – a place with the comforts of home and the diversions of America’s favorite vacation island.

When the RBC Heritage Classic took place April 18-21, right down the road from Spicebush, we were reminded that the famous Harbour Town Golf Links are just one of more than 30 courses that Spicebush visitors and owners can enjoy nearby. Of course, some of the very best are right here within the gates of Sea Pines.

A Fresh Trip Around a Classic

Atlantic Dunes is a complete reconstruction of Sea Pine’s original golf course, the historic Ocean Course. Designer and architect Davis Love III is a Heritage Classic favorite as a player, and so he brought special insights that we’ve gained over the years about the character of golf in Sea Pines to his fresh design. One result? Atlantic Dunes was named National Course of the Year by the National Golf Course Owner’s Association (NCGOA).

The course sometimes flirts with the shoreline and sometimes embraces it, blending that beachfront with the stately pines that gave this resort its name, and with the ancient, Spanish moss-draped live oaks that seem to pass an age-old blessing on the rounds of Harbour Town golf that people play today.

For Heavy-Hitters – and Their Friends

Heron Point, a 7,035-yard course from the back tees, offers an excellent round for going long. And yet, with seven sets of tees, including tees for junior golfers, this Pete Dye course can be played a variety of ways, including shorter. Regardless of the way you choose to play it, the experience is dramatic, with four holes guarded by water, fairways bounded by dense, green bulkheads and walls of wooded groves, and Dye’s sculptural way of using mounds and swales to both frame and guard the target areas.

The course achieves this in the nature-friendly way pioneered by Sea Pines, such that it has won the designation of Certified Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary. The welcome and the challenge Heron Point extends to golfers made it the 2015 Golf Course of the Year for South Carolina, and one of Golf Digest’s “Best Places to Play.”

The One the World Comes to Play

Thanks to hours of postcard-quality TV coverage each year of the Heritage Classic, the Harbour Town Golf Links come to be a bucket-list round for golfers from Ireland to Irving, Texas, and from Albany to Adelaide, Australia. And no wonder. For Spicebush visitors and owners, it is one of our neighborhood courses.

When Harbour Town Golf Links was completed – in just 18 months – for that first Heritage in 1969, Sports Illustrated called it “…nothing short of a work of art.” Even when they reached into history for the inspiration, course designer Pete Dye, course consultant Jack Nicklaus and Sea Pines founder Charles Fraser were ahead of their time. The links design at Harbour Town anticipated by more than four decades the restoration of Pinehurst No. 2 to its original design.

Designed like the links of Scotland, it can’t be won with power alone, or even power primarily. Harbour Town Golf Links calls for skill with every club in the bag – and a bit of cunning they say.

Vacationing here in the heart of Golf Island is good news not only for golfers, but also for the ones who love them, too. The attractions of America’s favorite vacation island include such a wide variety fun that even coming along as the gallery of your loved one’s golf outing can be every bit the thrill for you that you see in them.

Come see us in Spicebush at Sea Pines, and discover your own best version.