The Crucible - Hole #8
Par 3, 333 feet
 Dagon Owen drives into the woods. Those Texas boys are considerate. You can tell 'cause he threw a blue disc which is nice and easy to see in this picture. Unfortunately for Dagon he caught a tree on the right and kicked straight left. You can see where he ended up if you check below... |
Hole #8 is pretty much a straight shot downhill from the field into the woods. The basket is across the creek and protected by a big ol' tree (I'm sure most people could tell you what type of tree it is, but I haven't the foggiest). There is a slope that goes down from right to left once you're across the creek and it goes down to the creek so it's easy to hyzer our and skip into the water if you're not careful. It's plenty reachable with a roc but lots of people threw beat drivers instead.
| Overall |
Open Men
|
Pro Masters Men
|
Advanced Men
|
Open Women
|
|
| Average |
3.4 (9)
|
3.2 (5)
|
3.6 (6)
|
3.5 (11)
|
3.8 (5)
|
| Birdies |
17
|
8
|
2
|
7
|
0
|
| Pars |
94
|
25
|
9
|
59
|
2
|
| Bogeys |
57
|
10
|
5
|
41
|
1
|
| Doubles |
16
|
2
|
4
|
9
|
1
|
| Other |
4
|
1
|
0
|
3
|
0
|
 That's it, right there. Where's the basket? Well, it's in the general direction of Dagon's next shot. That's easy to see as well, since he was nice enough to do a color analysis and calculate that a nice bright red would do best against the mottled green backdrop. He ended up with a bogey... |
This one was interesting. See, last year's hole #8 sucked. Sure, for a while I tried to believe that it didn't, but, let's be honest here (the worst thing that ever happened to the design of that hole was that I parked it the first 3 times I threw it.). So that one was gone. I walked around for a bit before I realized there was this HUGE MONDO MEGA FAIRWAY going straight into the woods. We really didn't have to clear much at all to get that fairway you see up there. I'm not sure how I missed it last year.
Anyway, and I found a spot I really liked for the basket, about 20 feet from the creek on the slope of the hill. Thing is, I was pretty concerned about that bank getting worn down a lot from the foot traffic so I moved it up the hill just a touch. Which was fine except then the basket was directly behind the big tree. I didn't want that either. So it move a bit more up the hill so it could be seen... except then it was on such a slope that we couldn't set up our temporary basket. So it moved up hill just a bit more. All of which was fine except what I succeeded in doing was bringing two trees into play that weren't supposed to be. All of a sudden my brand new, ultra-fair, slightly sneaky hole had pimp trees on it (check out the top picture, they're the 2 trees just to the apparent right of Dagon's disc).
Well, we lived with it and it played pretty well, but in the future I'm definitely going to move the basket down the hill some and the tee to the right some, in effect rotating the hole. What I wanted was a hole that should be a roc shot but lots of people will throw drivers on and have them skip down the hill into the water (I'm so sly). I'm not sure we got quite that, but it's not a bad hole and is certainly better than last year's.
And in case you're wondering how Courtney did after tearing up hole #7, she didn't keep up her pace in the woods. In fact, she gave back all 3 shots to par that she got on hole #7, but that's ok, lots of other people did pretty much the same thing (and without getting 3 shots against par the hole before).
Oh, and see that 1 under Open Men - Other (more than 2 over par)? That was me. I took a 6 here, including a stroke for an unplayable lie (my first ever, I think). I could see my disc, I just wasn't going into those briars to get it.