About the Club
Course Tips
First Hole
You are not allowed to hit across Wharf Road from the first tee. The ideal tee shot settles about 160 yards from the tee. If you are going to miss the green with your second shot, be sure to miss left, not right.Third Hole
The wooded tees for this hole are set back in a tree-lined tunnel. Straight tee shots are rewarded. There’s little margin of error for balls straying left or right. Be careful not to hit your approach too long. It likely will find a shallow, strategically-placed bunker behind the green.Fifth Hole
If you have any tendency to fade your drives, aim well left away from the brush, rocks and sandy beach on the right. Approach shots to this elevated green must be precise. There’s danger to the left and right.
The Great Chebeague Golf Club is unique and pleasurable in many ways. First of all, it’s on an island--there are only five island golf courses in the state of Maine.
To paraphrase the beloved Rachel Lyman Field poem, once you’ve played golf on an island, you’ll never be quite the same.
But that’s not all that makes the club unique.
It may sound apocryphal, but the Great Chebeague Golf Club was founded almost 100 years ago when two rusticators (the now archaic name for island seasonal residents) were out picking blueberries one August day and decided this would be a perfect place for a golf course. Shortly afterwards, they laid out six holes with a clothesline and two months later played the first round of golf on Great Chebeague Island, sometimes hitting over and around a herd of cows.
Skeptical golfers, new to the course, ask,
“Can you really see the ocean from every hole?”
Once they’ve played it, they realize that the views make a well-played shot all the more satisfying and a not so precise shot not so hard to take. They can relate to the member who imposes a fanciful two-stroke penalty on her playing companions who don’t pause to marvel at the view of the cove from the elevated tee of the sixth hole.
Only five courses in Maine are on the prestigious National Register of Historic Places. The Great Chebeague Golf Club is one of them.
In 2022, the club began the rigorous, years-long process of becoming certified by Audubon International as a Cooperative Sanctuary Golf Course, a distinction only six golf courses in Maine have attained.
Few courses in the country can boast of a clubhouse built over 200 years ago. The Great Chebeague Golf Club’s clubhouse, constructed first as a farm house around 1804, is one of them.
For many golfers, the club’s storied signature hole, the seventh, is the most challenging of its nine holes. The 110-yard par three requires a shot from the Stone Wharf over Casco Bay to the course’s most difficult green. Paradoxically, the hole offers the best chance for a hole-in-one.
Although friendly and fun for novice golfers, the course is challenging for low-handicappers. The course record is only six under par for 18 holes—compared to eight or nine under at such world-renowned courses at Augusta National, Oakmont and Cypress Point.